


Wildling

by Cluegirl



Series: Changelings [4]
Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: AU Gender politics, Alpha/Beta/Omega Dynamics, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Assassination plot, Attempted Sexual Assault, Canon Divergence - Post-Avengers (2012), F/F, F/M, Multi, Other, Pack Family, Police corruption, Some TV hosts never change, Steve's terrible awful no good very bad day, long distance relationships are hard, no good deed goes unpunished
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-11-27
Updated: 2021-01-29
Packaged: 2021-02-26 02:47:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 26,962
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21586348
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cluegirl/pseuds/Cluegirl
Summary: “And we’re back with Captain America this morning,” the host announced, his bland distraction gone suddenly plummy and facile as recorded applause from an absent audience faded politely down.  “People Magazine’s Bachelor Alpha of the Year, Pack leader of the Avengers, three time Medal of Honor veteran, Hero of Kriegsberg, Manhattan, and a whole lot more that are probably still classified today, am I right?”The muscle in the Target’s temple jumped, but his smile barely wavered as he looked at his hands and shrugged.  “I’m just a kid from Brooklyn, Bill,”
Relationships: Natasha Romanoff/Steve Rogers, Steve Rogers/Tony Stark
Series: Changelings [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/136491
Comments: 199
Kudos: 165





	1. Cue applause

“Fifteen seconds till go-live,” yelled the man with the clibboard, “Quiet on set!”

Most people on the sound stage ignored him, carrying on their muttered conversations with the air of long practice. Up on the stage however, Steve — the Target had told several people to call him that since he’d arrived, and answered to his rank and callsign only grudgingly — straightened in his chair and turned politely toward the camera the clipboard man pointed out to him. This put his unarmored left temple squarely, sweetly, into the crosshairs of the Soldier’s scope, and when he smiled a guarded smile to the cameraman, the Soldier could see the stage lights glinting like golden sparks on the close cropped hair beside his ear.

“And we’re back with Captain America this morning,” the host announced, his bland distraction gone suddenly plummy and facile as recorded applause from an absent audience faded politely down. “People Magazine’s Bachelor Alpha of the Year, Pack leader of the Avengers, three time Medal of Honor veteran, Hero of Kriegsberg, Manhattan, and a whole lot more that are probably still classified today, am I right?”

The muscle in the Target’s temple jumped, but his smile barely wavered as he looked at his hands and shrugged. “I’m just a kid from Brooklyn, Bill,”

“Pshht, and I’m the Queen of Romania!”

The absent audience laughed, and the Target did too. His fingers were laced so tightly together in his lap that the knuckles were white, though if he noticed, the host called no attention to it. The Soldier wondered what the Target’s scent would be revealing to him, if he were unmasked and closer to the stage. Would that cream and linen smell he knew from the tracking scrap Lukin had given him be starchy with nerves now? Or curdled sharp and stinging with repressed temper? Would the caramel bloom hot with bashful pleasure at the flattery? Not only did the Soldier not know, he wasn’t certain why he wanted to.

His orders were for a showplace kill; too definite to be denied, too splashy to be covered up. And here finally, after weeks of public anonymity, his Target had donned his iconic uniform and stepped into a situation tailored to the kill parameters. And the Soldier was suddenly worried about the Target’s state of mind?

He tracked the scope down the Captain’s face, marked how more tiny gold hairs gleamed along the line of his heroic jaw — a missed stroke in a hurried shave perhaps — and how the artery below that jaw throbbed faster than indicated by the man’s outward calm. The Soldier could see the flutter of movement above the collar of the Target’s raucously colored uniform, that pulsing vein dancing under his skin like a moth’s wing battering lantern glass. One bullet there, severing that dancing shadow, and his great heart would empty his body of blood in four seconds or less. It took longer than that to stand up from a toppled chair.

The Soldier had been instructed to destroy a critical organ with his first bullet — the heart, or brain if the shot could be taken without rendering the corpse unidentifiable, but… Well, the carotid was big, and at the correct angle, the exit wound could sever the jugular as well, and no accelerated healing factor could counter such catastrophic and sudden blood loss as that, could it?

Or perhaps the Target would smell like nothing but the clothes he wore, the way he had done just this morning, when the Soldier had brushed past him in the crowded street outside the studio...

The clothes had been a riot of scent, from laundry soap to breakfast, with at least six other people's scents layered into it, but the man who wore them? The Soldier hadn't been able to taste him at all through the melange. Oh, the clothes in the backpack he'd brought smelled _almost_ right -- apparently the Captain whose clothes and face, and staunch, resinous body-scent was similar enough to almost be a twin to the smoothly sturdy omega who had worn that scrap of plaid that the Soldier still had in his kit. The man who'd walked into the studio hadn’t smelled like the target at all -- not the omega the Soldier had been sent to execute on live TV, nor even the alpha body double who for weeks now had been everywhere the Soldier had been told that target omega would be.

“So,” the Host was saying, a gleam in his eye somewhere between gleeful and predatory, “We’ve heard that you have been unusually popular with the omegas lately, Captain. Want to share your dating secrets with our viewers?”

The Target blushed a fierce rosy pink from his hairline to his collar. Probably farther down as well. “I’m not dating right now, actually,” he said.

The Soldier slipped metal fingers into his hair and popped open the clasp on his filtering mask. The open rafters over the sound stage's baffle sheets were dusty and smelled of mice, but once the urge to sneeze had passed, the Soldier unclenched his teeth, laid the mask aside, and drew in a careful breath through the hole he'd torn in the soundproofing foam. The room below his roost was full of collateral damage, live witnesses, and complications, but none of them were sitting in the focus of a dozen high powered incandescent lights, so the convection of air inside the sealed room brought the Host and the Target most strongly, most readily up to the Soldier’s regard.

It was so, so _close_ … cream, warm linen, salty caramel, notes of pine pitch and candle wax… but how much was the man, and how much was trace from the uniform?

“But what about Tony Stark?” the Host urged, his scent bleeding musk sharp and eager, “You’ve been seen around his Manhattan Tower a lot, given that you’re currently living in DC. Are you and Iron Man considering a bonding event perhaps? Or are the rumors that you’ve settled into the Black Widow’s web a little closer to the truth?”

“Sorry,” the Target said, and stopped fidgeting at once. “I wasn't raised to talk about folks' private business like that. My Ma thought gossip brought more shame to the speakers than the subject, and she raised me not to speak it, or listen. In public or in private.”

For some reason, the Soldier found himself smiling at that, imagining stinging ears and soapy mouths. From the way the Host’s smile froze over, perhaps he imagined the same thing, but found the thought less amusing.

“Well,” he recovered smoothly, “Modern morals, if we have to call it that, have certainly changed a lot from what you must have known. I’m sure there’s a lot of things about the modern world that have caught you off guard, right? Like, say, a certain young omega whom, our sources in the police say, made you a rather insistent public proposition last month in the restroom at Penn station?”

“It was a misunderstanding,” the Target — or rather the Target’s alpha body double — said through his teeth. “And an accident of timing, brought on by stress. I walked the young man to the medical station, and then waited with him until the EMTs could take him to a heat shelter. No one was injured or even particularly inconvenienced, and I’m not sure why the police would even have made a record of the event.”

“But it’s not the first time this has happened, is it, Captain?” the host leered, clearly enjoying himself. “Omegas who just _happen_ to fall into cycle when they’re alone with you in a semi-private place? It’s known as Omegabombing these days, in case no one’s told you. Also called the Moneytrap, and Knotbin-”

“I’ve been told.” The tone of the… of Steve's reply made no secret of his displeasure, and the Soldier found himself curious as to just why the Host seemed so eager to goad him to it. “But I think people who believe it’s as easy as that for an omega to time his heat and bring it on in public are missing a lot of information on what an omega goes through when that happens.” He leaned toward the host, gaze locked as if no other eye, human or mechanical, mattered. “Heat is a deeply vulnerable time, before, during, and afterward. Emotions run high, and it’s easy to panic when it comes on and you’re far away from where you feel safe. It’s even easier to make rash decisions in the moment that you would never want to be held accountable for later on.”

 _Maybe…_ The Soldier set the scope to his eye and drew another breath in, high and hard past his teeth, then frowned at the taste. No, that was definitely the alpha down there, clear now in a rising pulse of woody musk on the heated air.

The host leaned in, not warned off at all. “That’s why decent omegas nearing their season used to stay at home, back in your day though, wasn't it?”

Steve’s answering look was suspicious. “Those who could, yes. Even back then though, employers didn’t always care when you were due. They didn’t want you causing a ruckus at work, but also didn’t want you gone from your job an hour longer than you had to be. Those omegas who could afford to would stay home and den up for a couple of days before their heats though, sure. It was considered—”

“Safer?”

Steve let the eager word hang in the air for a long and uncomfortable moment before raising one eyebrow up high. “More dignified,” he said every syllable, as if the host might not understand what the words meant. “What a bad heat can put an omega through is anything but delicate, and nobody should have to come undone like that with only strangers around. But with minimum wage so low and living costs so high, not many omegas can afford to miss even an extra hour's work these days.”

“Oh, of course you’re right,” the host soothed, so condescending the Soldier found a pulse of annoyance rising through even his detachment, “But omegas wandering around in public so provocatively close to their heats is just —”

“Provocative?” The question had clearly not been meant to finish the sentence, but the Host nodded, grinning as if it had.

“Yes, of course, and —”

“Provocative to whom, exactly?” Steve challenged, “And of what?”

“Well, to alphas, of course,” the host showed his teeth in a broadly chummy smile, but the scope’s magnification revealed the gleam of a sudden sweat beading his hairline. “I mean, it does seem an awful lot like an open invitation, doesn’t it?”

“An invitation?” The chest-rumble underscoring those words was a warning no idiot could have missed, but in case the show’s host had managed it, Steve’s glare looked fit to light the man on fire where he sat. “Mr. O’Rilley, an _invitation_ is something a person makes deliberately. In writing, or with very specific words, spoken face to face. Smelling a little sweet is a sign of fertility, not of consent, and there is no valid reason why an omega shouldn't be safe in public, even if he's fully gone in his heat! So long as he can walk on his own, he should be able to say where he wants to go, and get there safely.”

“But,” the Host rocked back, clearly derailed from his planned thrust, and perhaps beginning to realize he had lost control of the interview. “I mean really though, how can alphas be expected-”

“Because alphas are _men_ , not animals!” Steve shouted right over the equivocation and the microphone’s outraged squeal alike. “And no matter the external chemical stimulation, as _men_ we are fully capable of restraining ourselves!”

_We? Damn it._

“But,” the host blinked, looking nervously around for some distraction which, from the beaming smile on the face of the man with the clipboard, was not going to be happening soon, “There’s always the rut to consider, and — “

“And rut enclaves exist for the same reason that heat retreats do,” Steve shut him down without mercy. “If an Ace is feeling mean, he’s got a responsibility to sequester himself before he causes problems, and given that no het up Ought’s likely to try to beat a rival to death, I’d say alpha sequesterment is a more relevant topic of inquiry! But somehow these days all people want to talk about is how free Oughts should or shouldn't get to be in public, and whether they should or shouldn't be allowed the same basic freedoms as the rest of humanity deserve!.” He stood, plucked the microphone from his collar and loomed so that the carefully crafted lighting design turned his noble, earnest face into a glowering nightmare with clenched fists and not a scrap of patience left to his name. 

“Well let me tell you in the plainest words I know how, Mr. O’Rilley;” Steve said as the host seemed to suddenly realize he didn’t have anyplace to go without literally falling off the stage platform, “It is _insulting_ to all alphas that you are sitting there suggesting that because _some_ Ace meatheads don't feel obliged to get actual consent when they smell an omega or a gal who’s het up and keen for priming, that all the rest ought to be treated like goddamned rapists as well!”

And there, the Captain dropped his microphone in the host’s lap and stalked from the stage in ground eating strides. A few of the cameras tracked him while the shaken host called for the next commercial break, but they cut away when the various admins and PR folks arrowed in to see what they could smooth over before the Captain could storm out of the building entirely.

The whole soundstage exploded into applause the instant the clipboard man gave the all clear sign, which made the Captain reconsider his exit, and the host, red faced and furious, storm off the set in his turn. And in his roost in the soundstage’s rafters, the Winter Soldier eased back from his firing line and began disassembling his gun with silent practiced hands.

He was confused, and he did _not_ like it. Somehow the alpha had managed to get into the building and take the Captain’s place, when the Soldier had been _sure_ the real Target — the real Captain had to be the one he’d passed in the street. You couldn’t hide an alpha’s scent under scrubbers and soap; only a null or an omega scented subtle enough to pull that off, but the man he’d passed on the bridge had smelled like nothing at all, and it had been the _backpack_ that had smelled like the alpha twin, but… 

But what omega had the vocal cords to make the kind of glass-rattling growl the Captain had made just now? It wasn’t the right man. Somehow, a switch had been made. It was the first time since the Army base outside Portland that the Soldier had actually seen the Target wear that bright, armored suit where anyone but his team or his enemies could see him, and after a month of waiting in vain for some kind of autograph signing or public speech, or ticker tape parade, this television appearance had seemed like the perfect chance. Or rather, as it turned out, too good to be true.

At the bottom of his duffel, still safe in its plastic shroud, the shirt scrap gleamed dully pale through its stains and grime. He put the bag to his nose, cracked the zip seal just a little bit, and drew the scented air in deep, shivering over his tongue and along the roof of his mouth until he knew, all the way through to his bones that the man who had worn that shirt had absolutely, definitely, and categorically been an omega. And this man currently allowing himself to be plied with coffee and pastries and platitudes at the studio’s cheap plastic tables was _not_. He smelled similar -- maybe a brother, because there was not a whiff of pair bond to be detected in either scent. The not-Captain looked exactly the same as the reference photo Lukin had given him, but...

But surgery could do that. Stage prosthetics could too, for a little while. The Soldier's assignment was for a very public, high profile kill that would send a message that could not be silenced. Killing a body double would provide the opposite effect, allowing the real Captain to miraculously 'recover' and assure the world that it had been just a scratch, nothing worth worrying about, had ‘em on the ropes the whole time.

The Soldier stashed his duffel on the roof access stairs, slipped dark colored civilian clothes over his tac suit, and took advantage of the impromptu autograph session/show host tantrum to go find the dressing room, and if possible, some answers.

The Captain’s street clothes were folded neatly beside the makeup desk when he let himself into the room, tidy as a military man, or one who had to take good care of what little he could get, would leave them. The cotton undershirt on top of the stack was soft and cool against the Soldier’s face, but smelling it only made the confusion worse. This was the source of the crowd-scent. The worn grey fabric held the faded ghosts of several other people hiding beneath laundry soap, and not casual contact, neighborhood bonds either. There was a whole bonded pack’s touch-claim lurking in those threads. But the omega who had worn the Soldier’s torn, shabby tracking scrap had been very nearly isolated. Worryingly so.

And the alpha who had traded this muted shirt for the red, white, and blue armor, and then shamed the host on his own show with a jaw as firm as his convictions -- he was this pack's alpha It was plain as day... But he’d also taken this very undershirt from the omega the Soldier had been sent to kill. So… did that mean the omega was some kind of captive?

The idea made the Soldier want to crush something. But a furtive step in the hallway outside reminded him of his priorities in time to save the dressing room mirror. The Soldier was safely hidden above the lockers by the time the lurking coffee intern put his head into the room to check it was clear.

He was young, fresh faced and ruddy haired, and he wasted no time making straight for the Captain’s folded stack of clothes — minus the undershirt the Soldier had hastily stuffed under his jacket before hiding. The boy hastily pawed the neat stack into a disordered pile before turning up the pair of cotton shorts he’d obviously come for. His expression when he pressed the pale blue fabric to his face and breathed in deep was nothing short of beatific. A licorice-sweet curl of lust rose like steam off the young omega, who clearly was one of those had-to-work-with-heat-coming-on fellows that the show’s host had found so irresponsible earlier. The Soldier found this irony amusing on one hand, and deeply aggravating on the other.

He watched, breath shallow and quiet, and absolutely not restraining an urge to growl as the boy shoved the Captain’s shorts into a plastic bag, stuffed the bag under his shirt, and then dropped a replacement pair, still in the store packaging, on top of the rumpled pile before sneaking back out of the room. From down the hall, the host's voice could be heard in full rant over the soothing murmur of someone who'd been paid to care, but here in this little room, only the silence and the Soldier bore witness to this tiny, furtive, stolen intimacy the Captain had been given no chance to refuse.

But this was America, wasn't it? And for all its decadence and waste, who but the bourgeoisie had the means to truly refuse any intimacy or insult here?

He had found no answers among the dressing room's irritations though, and so it was probably past time the Soldier left as well. It wouldn't do to be spotted by the studio's security system, such as it was, and clearly this Captain situation was going to require more invasive profiling anyway. He needed to search out this pack, learn where they were denning the target omega, and then... find some way to engineer a public appearance, he supposed.

Tracking the alpha would be his best option for that, and the Soldier would need to be on the street before the Captain left the studio in order to trail him without being seen. Yes. Definitely time to be going.

He took the undershirt out of his jacket and tasted its secrets again, strangely pleased at the way his own scent now blended into the strange pack’s palette. He couldn’t leave it now without revealing himself, of course. Even if the alpha's nose wasn't good enough to pick him up through the noise, the omegas in the pack would notice the change at once. But... well, if he folded the rest of the Captain’s clothes back into their tidy pile before he left, it was just a matter of covering his traces, wasn't it.

_'Course it was._


	2. Starch

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Debrief and roll call.

“And then,” Steve snarled into the phone, “someone at the studio stole my goddamned _shorts_ too!”

“Your _shorts_?” Phil repeated.

“What, like, right off you?” Clint brayed over the cockpit roar and his own amusement. “What kind of interview was this, Cap?”

“You used the studio’s changing room, didn’t you?” Tony cut Steve’s reply to the pair off with a knowing cluck. “Happens to me all the time, Cap. That’s why I started just showing up to the stage in my armor. Saves on parking fees too, I might add.”

“I can’t wear the damn suit on the Metro, Tony,” Steve grumbled back, shrugging against the stiff cotton of his button down as he navigated the transit station crowds and the post-PR-debrief with his pack with equal grace and good humor — I.e. none whatsoever. (His pack would forgive him, Steve knew, but the transit station crowds definitely had it coming. And who the hell had starched this darned shirt, anyhow? Even his combat uniform had more give!)

“He’s right, Stark,” Natasha put in, not hiding her amusement, “DC’s not like New York. They have Lobbyists down here. Cap wouldn’t have made it three blocks in the Colors.”

“They stole,” Phil said again, growling slightly, “your shorts?”

“Yeah,” Steve sighed, tugging at his collar while he waited for a family with far too much luggage to finish clogging the escalators and let him by, “Not to mention my damn undershirt.”

And it was that, of course, which brought everyone’s attention to heel.

“Which one?” Nat demanded, “The grey one? Steve. It was the grey one, wasn’t it?”

“… Yeah,” Steve admitted, dodging a street preacher outside the station doors.

“Aw, shirt!” Clint yelped, while Phil’s silence grew teeth and claws. “It was my turn next, too!”

“The Snuggle shirt?!” Tony scolded in the kind of voice Steve usually only heard him use with his lab bots. “You wore the Snuggle shirt to a _TV Studio_? Steve!”

“Well how was I to know there was gonna be a panty raid?” Steve snapped back, then had to look hastily away as a trio of giggling boys outside a Starbucks aimed their cell phones his way, “Forgive me for assuming my property and personal boundaries would be treated with something approaching respect!”

“I’ll email SHIELD PR about that interview,” Phil said at last. “Whatever intern arranged it needs to be scheduled for a long, detailed workplace comportment and sensitivity training seminar.”

“And a re-test with me on their combat qualifications too,” rumbled Natasha in a growl that declared the beat down would happen whether they met her in the ring or didn’t.

“I don’t know though, guys,” Tony mused in a strangely moderate tone. “I mean wasn’t it kind of awesome to watch Cap deal out a pants-down spanking over consent politics on live TV? Any other Avenger, O’Rilley would have just turned off the mics and screamed over us, but I guess Captain Not-Your-Bigot-Bitch caught him right off guard, didn’t you honey?”

“Looked to me like you were gonna catch him with an uppercut too, there for a minute,” Clint added. “I had my standing ovation all ready.”

“It’s true,” Phil agreed, over a muffled background cheer of ‘let’s hear it for Captain America!’, “Even May and Simmons were rooting for violence by the end there.”

Steve, who had seriously thought about decking the show host it in the moment, only sighed, and edged into the street to avoid a woman pushing a _very_ large stroller… with a dog inside it. “Well, if Bruce or Thor had been there, they might’ve gotten their hit.” Which didn’t do much to rein in the team’s cackling schadenfreude, but it did at least make Steve feel a little better as he stepped back up onto the curb again. “Any word from them, Tony?”

“Matter of fact, I found a big, black, ugly Bird Of Ill Omen on my pool deck half an hour ago.” The reply came in a tone of voice more often referencing subway rats than with the Imperial Bird of the Asgardian court, but that was Tony for you. He had a _thing_ about birds. “Along with its normal pathogen load, it was also carrying a little thank you note from Bruce for you, Cap. Said he was really glad to be unavailable, and he owes you big time for taking that particular bullet for him. Though please do _not_ ask me how he managed to see the broadcast on Asgard, because I do not even want to start working that particular equation out before cocktail hour.”

“Let’s not tell Commander Fury about the raven thing, shall we?” Phil mused. “He already has anxiety about how Asgardians get around.”

“Don’t we all?” Clint put in, dry as ice.

“Are you coming back down to the Tryskelion, Steve?” Natasha asked over them both, changing the conversational thrust with fierce determination. “It’s trainee day, and I could use you in the gym to help me shake these puppies down.”

“Ooh, mood he’s in? That’s harsh!” Tony laughed, and Natasha’s reply was all smugness.

“Gotta weed out the weak somehow. If they can face up to face Steve in a temper without wetting themselves or fainting, then…”

“Then you probably oughta schedule them a psych eval,” Steve finished for her, unable to keep the fondness from his voice. “I’m too mad, Nat. I’m also hungry, I got a suppression headache, and this damned shirt’s itching me so bad right now I wouldn’t trust me to secure a HYDRA prisoner alive, let alone deal with a poor defenseless SHIELD trainee.”

“I can be there in an hour,” Tony volunteered at once, not even trying to hide his eagerness, “To feed you and take you shopping for another Snuggle shirt I mean, not the trainee thing. Nobody wants that. Just let me save off this review schedule, and-”

“Pardon me Sir, but you have a luncheon meeting scheduled with Miss Potts,” Jarvis cut in smoothly, to Steve’s silent disappointment.

“This is a Snuggle shirt emergency, J!” Tony insisted, “Pepper will understa-”

“ _And_ the Maria Stark Foundation committee, and the director of the Met, regarding the staging of this year’s fundraising ball. I believe this will be the fourth attempt Miss Pots has made at arranging the meeting, and the note she has made in your calendar includes the phrase ‘on pain of castration,’ Sir. I think, perhaps, you had better attend.”

“I can buy my own shirt, Tony,” Steve cut in before the argument could escalate. “You guys are just going to steal whatever I pick up anyhow.”

“Pshyeah; pack building,” Clint observed, “At least we don’t take your undies.” 

“No TMI, Stark,” Natasha warned, and Steve’s failing temper had to weather yet another surge of fondness for this pack of misfits he somehow managed to deserve.

“Right now though,” Steve rolled onward over Tony’s mock outrage at the callout, “all I want to do with the rest of the day is find a bar that serves food, drink weird, over-hopped beer, and waste a Personal Day watching some other team beat up the Yankees until I feel better about the fate of humanity.”

“Oddly specific, but relatable,” Phil agreed. “So are you going to tell us which bar you’re headed for, or are you going to just let Stark hack your phone’s GPS for it?”

And what could Steve do with that but laugh? They weren’t going to come and hover — the only member of his pack close enough to intrude on his sulk without breaking several FCC regulations, and/or laws of physics was Natasha, and she would just about rather be lit on fire than sit through televised baseball. But just the fact that they all genuinely wanted to know where their bonding omega would be spending his day anyhow was never going to be anything but charming to the part of Steve's heart that had always feared he would never fit in anywhere.

“I’ll let you know when I find a dive seedy enough for me,” he promised with a grin as he stepped down to cross the street with the growing lunchtime crowd.

“Still buying you the shirts!” Tony yelped before the call dropped. Because of course he was. Steve would’ve expected nothing less from him.

***

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A short one today, peril posies. Many of you will be busy with Consumption and Consequences therof today, so this little snip should fit easily into the cracks between football and pie, I figure.
> 
> Tomorrow's taste will be meatier. Meanwhile, enjoy a little fluff.


	3. Snare

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A kind of drum, a kind of trap, a kind of strategy.

The problem with alphas — assuming Sam had to pick only one — was that they tended to be, as a rule, pretty goddamned clueless about women.

Which was, admittedly, not entirely their fault. Evolution had pretty much designed them around omegas from the start, but still. Alphas never seemed to pick up on a gal’s scent cues, even the clear-as-fuck-off ones that any beta could read at ‘hello.’ Maybe it was pheromonal wire-crossing, or maybe it was pure inexperience — after all, omegas were rather easier to find in a bar at happy hour than a woman — but the end result of watching this alpha meathead intrude repeatedly on the lady’s attempt at a relaxing post-work drink had been a trial of endurance Sam’s day had really _not_ needed.

And judging from the simmering mix of anger and worry coming off the lady in question as the alpha bought over yet _another_ un-asked-for drink, and this time delivered it to her table himself, Sam figured her day could have done without it too.

“Thank you,” she said through her teeth, “Again… but I really can buy my own drinks.”

“Well sure you can, but a pretty gal like you shouldn’t have to, am I right?” the dude grinned, either not noticing, or else not caring that he was literally leaning on the back of Sam’s chair. “But hey, it’s fine, it’s fine. It’s just a diet coke, I promise. You look like a diet coke kinda girl.”

Sam rolled his eyes, torn between the urge to interfere, and the strong suspicion that the woman wouldn’t thank him for it if he did. Still, as he watched her patience grow thinner and wearier in the time it took to sigh, watched her glance at the pint glass and read in her eyes the temptation to just drink it, humor the meathead, and hope he would go away with a little courtesy, Sam couldn’t help growling under his breath, “She said ‘no.’”

And because Meathead was leaning on Sam’s damned _chair_ Sam felt it the instant his unfortunate words registered past whatever hormonal stew Meathead had brewing.

“The hell did you say, Deuce?” he demanded, puffing up and rumbling as he grabbed the chair to either yank it around, or tip Sam right out of it.

Sam braced, thinking he was gonna have to decide between deescalation and grievous bodily harm in about half a second, but to the surprise of everyone, his chair didn’t so much as budge in Meathead’s grip. Because apparently the alpha sitting to Sam’s left, had decided this situation needed to be even more complicated, and was holding the damned thing still from the other side. With… just his knee?

“He said, ‘She. Said. No,’” The blond beefcake answered, slow and loud, like he was talking to a moron. “And he’s right. She did. Four times so far. So maybe it’s time you took the hint and left her alone.” Then he reached across Sam’s slice of the bar to snag the drink from in front of the woman and eyeball Meathead mercilessly while drinking it down in one long go.

Sam didn’t know whether to cheer or facepalm, so he channeled his Nana instead, and muttered, “Rude. I’d have passed it if you’d asked, you know.”

“Look, could you all just-” the lady began, but Meathead was apparently not ready to let anything go yet.

“What the fuck is wrong with you, asshole?” he bellowed, shoving past Sam to get at the blond who’d so thoroughly disrespected him. 

“Just thirsty,” the other man said, steely dislike glinting from his eyes as he set the pint glass down on the bar with a very final-sounding ‘toc’.

Sam took the distraction to grab his phone and slip out of swinging range, but one pleading look from the woman kept him from holding down the 911 key just yet. He took a quick assessment of her suit, the quality of her purse and heels, and realized she probably worked on the Hill, which meant that getting caught up in a bar fight would almost certainly lead to more consequences for her career than for either of the alphas. He put the phone back, but kept himself between her and them anyhow — the ghost of his Nana would have snatched him bald if he’d just left the lady on her own, though he didn’t expect her to get that.

“And I’m also pretty darn tired of watching you stalk that gal like a rabbit, if I’m honest,” alpha-on-the-left went on, turning his barstool so that Meathead had to step back, or be knocked by the man’s knees. “Even in the 40’s, we knew what the hell _”no”_ meant. So I’m figuring this ain’t so much a matter of culture shock, as it is you being an asshole, and needing to go home and think about your life choices. While you can still get there without help, that is.” And that was when he stood up, crossed his arms over a chest that was suddenly _way_ too wide for the shirt he had it in, and served up a disapproving stare no idiot with internet access could have failed to recognize.

Especially since that epic Disapproving Face had been looped on CNN’s news cycle and trending on twitter since the interview that had launched Bill O’Rilley’s early retirement that morning.

To Meathead’s credit, he did at least take a breath when he realized he was chest to chest and looking to throw down with Captain America, but apparently that wasn’t enough to get him past the hormone poisoning. “We was doing just fine without you, hero,” he rumbled, louder now to make up for the spreading murmurs as the rest of the bar noticed who had been drinking among them all day. “She didn’t ask you to go stickin’ yer big nose in!”

“The day I need to be _asked_ to be a decent human being is the day you’d better start being frightened, son,” Cap answered, taking hold of Meathead’s arm with a grip that looked gentle, but from what Sam knew about pressure points and tendon anatomy, was anything but. Meathead wheezed, but wasn’t quite able to make himself resist as he was led inexorably toward the door, through a crowd that parted before them like the Red Sea. “Now I’ll settle up your tab with the bar man, but I think it’s time you went home and looked up the definition of ‘consent’.”

“Oh for fuck’s sake,” Sam heard the woman mutter under her breath as the bar’s doorman took charge of the escort, and the only semi-ironic applause began to spread through the crowd. She had, he noticed when he glanced back, her own phone in her hand, and the Lyft app already open. She showed her teeth when she saw him looking. “I could have handled him.”

Which, based on how quick Meathead had spiraled toward Red when challenged, Sam was pretty sure they both knew to be a lie, but he nodded politely anyhow. “I know that, ma'am. Pretty sure Cap knows that too, but-”

“He didn’t need to,” her dark eyes flashed up over Sam’s shoulder, and the rage in them sharpened at once as the hero of the hour returned from the door. “You didn't need to save me!”

“Of course not, ma’am,” Cap answered like butter wouldn’t have melted in his mouth. “But please don't assume I did that for your sake — that was all for me. I’ve always had a real hard time minding my own business when someone’s getting bullied, and I was just about done with that fella when he dosed your soda behind the bartender’s back.”

“He...” the woman gulped, going white, “he did what?”

Which had been why Cap slammed the drink, of course. “What was it?” Sam demanded, medic brain whirling up to speed as he tried to remember what date rape drugs were on the streets right now, “In the drink?”

“Powder?” the barman cut in, taking the implication dead serious. “Tablet, maybe, or a slip of paper?” There were any number of compounds that could be introduced by mouth to achieve any number of incapacitating results, from a false heat, to a blackout fugue state, and not one of them would fall under the heading of ‘benign’.

“Something liquid,” Cap shrugged, reclaiming his chair as if nothing had happened. “Had it in a little dime store eyedrops bottle. Palmed up his sleeve after, so I couldn't catch the label. Dunno whether that's what made the diet stuff taste so awful or if it just comes out of the fountain that way though.”

The bartender snagged the glass at once, and dumped it, ice and all, into a large ziplock bag before Sam even had to ask him not to dump it. “I’ll just put this up for the cops then,” he said, and carried the whole sloshing thing back to the money drop in the floor. Seemingly unconcerned, Rogers just picked up his own beer and drained the glass as though to wash the soda's taste out of his mouth.

Cap glanced Sam’s way before he had managed to school his face from horrified medical professional to just a bystander minding his business, and he shook his head with a smile that managed to be wry and reassuring at once. “I’ll be fine though,” he said with the air of a promise, “I’m easily twice the lady’s size, and I have the serum going for me here. Even if he had something really potent in that bottle, he wouldn’t have been dosing for the likes of me.”

“Okay, but I’m pretty sure the beer chaser isn’t gonna make it _better_ ,” Sam answered. “I thought you were supposed to lead by example!”

That, for some reason, won him a laugh. Kind of a big one. It was both alarming, and reassuring at the same time, though Sam wasn’t sure how the man achieved it. “Well, I’ll add it to the next PSA video,” he managed eventually. “But for now, how about if I promise I’ll let you know if I start to feel funny?”

Unimpressed, Sam gave him the eyebrow. “Uh huh. And I’m supposed to do what about it if your two hundred plus hero ass keels right over on the ground? Call the White House while I’m doing CPR or something?”

That won him a long, evaluating look, at the end of which, Rogers smirked, snagged a bar napkin with one hand and a sharpie from beside the till, then scribbled a number under one larger than life word. Then he folded it up like a pocket square, reached over to tuck it into Sam’s shirt next to his work ID, and grinned, “Just call the Avengers.”

And that, apparently, was what Sam’s life included now. His niece was going to scream the house down when she heard.

“So what now?” the woman’s voice, a trembling mix of adrenaline crash and furious tears, snared Sam’s attention smartly away from his impending Facebook update. She was over her mental knockback, but clearly mad as hell at the attack — as she should be — and swinging for the fences at the only people close enough to hit. “Is this where you take over his game?” she hissed, eyes blazing challenge, “Now you two heroes offer to drive me home, right? Alone? So you can get me without witnesses? ‘Cause who’d take my word against yours without witnesses, right?”

“No ma’am,” Sam hurried to assure her, trying not to take mad at the accusation. “Not at all.”

From the corner of his eye, he could see Cap’s hands come up in surrender. “I was honestly just looking forward to being able to finish my fries in peace,” he promised, somehow wry and earnest at once. “Your staying here, or going somewhere else didn’t figure anywhere in my plans, I promise. Although I gotta say, if you honestly think that’s how something like this is supposed to end up, you've been hanging around some rotten fellas.”

Sam winced inside, but allowed the point; a woman working in DC, at a job that required a suit and heels of the quality she was wearing would definitely come with more than her share of male attitude to scrape off her after a long day, even without attempted roofies in her Diet Coke. But only a dumbass alpha would actually go and _say_ so.

“Really?” She chinned up to his poster boy smile, the slide of her head a clear warning, “I just get up and walk out of here all by myself, and you're not going to stop me?”

“Stop you? No. I had thought it might be a good idea for either me, or this stand up Beta here,” he clapped a hand Sam should have seen coming onto his shoulder, but managed not to make him stagger under the friendly jostle, “to maybe walk out to the street with you when your ride comes though. Just to be sure that fine upstanding gentleman we met earlier isn’t still hanging around with a grudge.”

She stared at Rogers like she was trying to read his mind, or see through his skin. Then she turned that same expectant glare on Sam and he found himself remembering, suddenly, how lying to his Nana had been impossible. She’d had eyes like that when she had a mad on, and Lord help the dissembler.

“Or have the doorman do it, if that’d make you feel safer,” Sam offered, earnest as he knew how. Then, recalling that, while the woman had clearly clocked Rogers’ identity, she didn’t know him from the King of Wakanda, he reached up to pull his VA lanyard out of his shirt pocket. “I’m Sam Wilson, by the way,” he watched her scan it, then tucked it back behind the bar napkin once once her eyes returned to his face. “I work with Veteran repatriation services over at the VA, and somehow despite all that, me and Cap have never met before today.”

“Well… I think I passed you jogging on the Mall the other day, actually,” Rogers contradicted bashfully. “Three times. On the left.”

“Shit, Thursday? That was you?!” Sam yelped, “You asshole! I nearly bust a lung trying to keep up with you out there!”

Which was what it took, apparently, to finally overcome combined weight of the woman’s mortification, annoyance, embarrassment, and fright, because she burst into a startled and somewhat reluctant laugh at Rogers’ bashful, but not remotely regretful, little shrug. Sam struggled not to follow her into it.

“What’d you do, like 13 miles in half an hour? Just for giggles?”

Again, he shrugged, not even pretending to be sorry. “It was a slow day.”

“Okay, it helps that you’re kind of an asshole” the woman allowed once she caught her breath a little. “Does anybody manage to stay mad at you though? Like ever?”

And _that_ was all it took to let Steve Rogers’ category five poster boy smile back out of hiding as well. “Iron Man holds the current record,” he told them as the barman returned with two plates piled high with garlic Parmesan fries, and set them down defiantly between their seats. “One time I taught one of his lab robots to beep 'John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt', and he wouldn't talk to me for a week after that…”

***

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So y'all knew Sam was gonna have to turn up in this somewhere, right?
> 
> Anyhow, thanks for your kudos and comments -- they give me (and my fic) liiiiiiffeee!


	4. Jinx

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A hex; a joke; an accident of synchronicity.

“So was ‘consent politics’ like your theme of the day today,” Sam asked as they stood together outside the bar and watched the woman — a Department of Justice intern named Rumiko — head out to meet her Lyft, “Or is this just like a normal Monday for you?” Steve — Captain America had told Sam to call him Steve — cut him a sidelong, unimpressed glare, which Sam definitely wasn’t buying at full price. “Because I gotta tell you man, I work with traumatized combat vets who sometimes relive active PTSD inducing episodes right in front of me, and most of my days? They don’t get me _nearly_ that close to throwing down with Aces in the Red.”

Steve snorted then, and for a moment that ‘pillar of the community and absolutely no threat to you ma’am’ heroic expression of his slid into something deeply sarcastic, amused on the surface, but more than a little bitter beneath. “Well, if that’s what you want to call ‘throwing down’…”

“Oh, is that how it is?” Because if Sam was good at anything, he was good at keeping doors open, and Vets talking. 

And just as he’d hoped, Steve’s moment of darkness slid away beneath a shit-eating grin as the Lyft pulled safely away from the curb. “What can I say?” he grinned turning back toward the bar, “My life these days amounts to punching things; paperwork; science that’s hard to tell from magic; magic that only sometimes acts like science; and traumatized combat vets reliving PTSD inducing events. 50/50 odds as to whether any of it’s trying to kill me at any given time, by the way.” He shrugged, and his grin trued up just a little bit. “A simple little attempted kidnapping like this one? Kind of a relief being able to stop it without bloodshed, if I’m being honest.”

 _Well now you’ve jinxed it!_ was what Sam was gonna say. And he was gonna be laughing when he said it too, because that was just the kind of morbid soldier superstition that vets bonded over wherever they met. And Steve was gonna laugh, too. Maybe do that shoulder clap thing that Sam still couldn’t quite believe didn’t hurt. And then they’d go back to fries, beer, and… 

Well, apparently not.

Instead, three pigeons burst into flight from the alley in a rattling clap of feathers and panic, and Sam didn’t have but a second to glance back that way, spot a flicker of shadow where it shouldn’t be — not even long enough for the word _’gun’_ to form up properly in his mind. Then he was lunging at Captain America, shoulder dipped to slam between his scapulae and shove for all he was worth. He didn’t move the man far — element of surprise could only achieve so much with a super soldier — but it was far enough that the first shots took Steve high in the shoulder instead of dead center in his chest. Sam felt the sear of heat over his head as Steve jerked hard twice, like a flinch from a too-bright camera flash. Blood sprayed in a hot, fine mist across Sam's face, and another, harder flinch spiraled their momentum down to the waiting pavement.

Steve twisted like a cat though, and while Sam was bracing for gravity to spill them onto the sidewalk like a tangle of sitting ducks, he somehow got hold of Sam’s bicep and _threw him_ off. Sam’s last sight of the man before slamming ass-first into the bar’s doorman, was of his determined face, bloodied at the temple as he tumbled out flat along the pavement and rolled briskly, forcefully under the shelter of a parked SUV. The car rocked on its shocks as he went under its shadow.

Then it was screams, shattering glass, howling car alarms, and the doorman utterly failing to either catch Sam, or get the fuck out of his way so he could fall and get up in peace. _Fucking civvies._

Sam kicked free of the toppled bench, shoved the thrashing door-grunt off his legs, and scrambled back to the entry to try and get a sitrep he could do something with. The panicky happy hour herd was riling up to stampede behind him, cars squealing and crashing around the side street to try and get clear of the shooting. The sidewalk lay dusted with diamond shatter from at least two cars besides the SUV that was, assuming Cap was taking shelter behind the engine block, rapidly losing everything but souvenir value as a temporary shield.

The shooting spree ended abruptly — only so long a gun on semi-auto can pin down a street, after all. The inversion of noise into whisper-tight dread was almost as loud as the screaming had been, but Steve’s roar of challenge punched through it all as if the thought of not being alive when the shooting stopped hadn’t even occurred to him. “This really how you wanted today to end, kid?"

Sam wasn’t the only one letting out a breath to hear that famous defiance as the man himself, scuffed, scraped, shot, and mad as hell, stood up from behind the ruined car and leveled a glare toward the bar’s roof as if the thought of staying under cover so he wouldn’t be shot on the reload hadn’t ever occurred to him either.

The voice that called back was no surprise to anybody.

“What, with me collecting the bounty on bringing you down for good?” Meathead’s reply was muffled, but close. It sounded like he was right over Sam’s head — an idea born out when something small and bullet sized clanged off the overhang of the marquee above the door. “Hell yeah, Captain Do-Right! That sweet Hydra money’ll set me up for life and then some!”

“Where are the back stairs?” Sam hissed, hauling the doorman to his feet.

“Bounty?” the man mumbled, dazed. “There’s a-”

“Stairs!” Sam shook him hard. “Where?”

“I got two nickels’ll buy you just as much as that, fella,” Cap rumbled back, all bare teeth and bloody face. His hands were wide and empty at his sides, and somehow seemed more threatening than if he’d knotted them up into fists or pointed a gun of his own right back up at the shooter. Ten cents was looking like it might just be more than Meathead _could_ spend in the lifetime he had left. “You maybe wanna put that gun down before someone who doesn’t deserve it gets-”

Another shot set the whole crowd diving again. Even Sam flinched back against the doorway, though he could feel in his soul how different this one was from the others. This was no full auto, spray-and-pray barrage; this was a quieter, deadlier, air-punching _pfft_ , followed almost instantly by a wet, melon-bursting sound, the flooding scent of blood, meat, and fresh urine in the air, and the marquee groaning under the impact of something heavy and very dead.

The Happy Hour Herd and a siren down the block all at once began to scream. The doorman lost a brief struggle with gravity as Sam let go of his jacket. Out in the street, Captain America, battle Alpha of the Avengers, whirled in place with his teeth bared, scanning the rooflines and tasting the wind for any sign of the second shooter. Blood and gutter and tempered glass streaked his shirt in a ruin diamond shadows as he turned, and turned, and turned again, searching and scenting in vain.

 _God save alphas,_ Sam thought, standing on his toes to wave for the bartender’s attention, _Cause betas can’t always be there._

The bartender lifted his chin to Sam’s silent hail, phone already in his hand, and looking just about ready to parkour over the bar and kick patrons out of his way if he had to. “Ice and towels!” Sam shouted, “And find your first aid kit!” Then he grabbed the toppled bench out from under the useless door grunt, and rushed out to Steve’s side.

“Hey man, it’s me,” he announced, easing himself under the man’s good arm and leaning hard to take the weight. “Let’s get you sat down, huh?” It was a risky move, coming up inside the reach of a man who’d just seconds before been under literal attack, but Steve was somehow neither shock-wobbly, or rigid with Red from the injury — which, Sam supposed, made sense, given what he did for a living — he just seemed tired and baffled, and annoyed by the last five minutes of what had otherwise clearly been an only mildly shitty day.

He didn’t fight Sam’s urging or snarl at his caretaking though -- one thing an alpha was always good at, thank all small mercies, was accepting medic support from a beta when they were hurt. And Sam had years of practice at being just the beta an Ace would be glad to see in a pinch. Mad as Cap had been when Meathead was holding the street hostage, he still accepted Sam’s help without so much as a warning rumble now, and let himself be sat, docile as a housecat while Sam checked his wounds over. That is to say, growling and hissing all the way, but not actively trying to escape or bite. Sam was almost proud of him. Or he would have been, if not for how he’d taken a simple, clean right trapezius through and through, and dipped it into whatever toxic biome was currently thriving in a Washington DC gutter.

“You just had to say it, didn’t you?” Sam scolded, lifting Steve’s chin so he could check to be sure the chest shot hadn’t nicked an artery. “ _Stop it without bloodshed_. Man, it’s like you ain’t even heard of Murphy’s Luck!”

Steve gave a hollow chuckle, glancing up as the bartender, an alpha himself, appeared with the supplies Sam had asked for in one hand, and a 911 dispatcher on his cell phone in the other. “Irish luck trumps Murphy's every time,” he said, then winced as Sam slapped a wet, icy towel to his forehead cut, (shallow graze, some debris but bleeding clean) but he reached up to hold the towel there being asked. “If the first hit doesn’t kill us, we just get back up mad.”

“And if it does kill you?”

A careful shrug. “Then we write songs about it and hold a grudge.”

To which, Sam had to laugh. “Yeah, I’ve heard that about you,” he said, getting his knife out and snapping it open. “Hey, I’m gonna cut this shirt out of my way so I can to get at your shoulder, okay? I don’t want to aggravate the wound by taking it off you the normal way.”

“Aw, shirt,” Steve muttered under his breath, but he nodded all the same. 

The first aid kit didn’t have anything like suture equipment, but at least it had enough tape and wound dressing to let Sam clean the mess up a bit. “So this would be the part where your buddy comes down and introduces himself I guess?” he asked, wiping triple antibiotic ointment off his hands and pressing a fresh towel down over the barely-seeping wound. Steve gave him a blank, weighty look, and Sam elaborated. “Hawkeye, right? Or was it one of the others out there covering your ass with a 50’ cal?”

The last vestige of Steve’s good humor crumbled at the question. “No,” he said, voice leaden and heavy as the first squad car at the scene came screeching around the end of the block and cut its siren, “Hawkeye’s on assignment overseas. None of the others would have done...” he waved a hand at the marquee, the red stain like a banner draped down the front, fat drops splatting paint-thick onto the sidewalk. “Even if my team had been here, they wouldn’t have just shot him down like that.”

Which Sam understood to mean ‘I have no idea who the shooter was, where he was, where he went, or why he didn’t shoot me and everyone else too.’ And there was no way anybody with battlefield experience was going to be taking that shit lightly. The hair at the back of his neck rose with the shivering urge to scan the skyline for any sign of the sniper — not that it would do any good to find the nest without a pair of wings to go and pluck the danger out of it. If they were in the sniper’s free fire zone, all the power was his and his alone. Only physics or luck could say any different.

And Steve had already said his piece on luck.

Steve swallowed and got to his feet as the squad slid to a stop beside the ruined SUV, lights strobing, doors flinging wide. “Have them keep my card at the bar, would ya?” he asked dredging up a smile neither of them believed in as he took the wet, stained towel from his forehead, and tossed it at the bench. “I’ll come back in and handle the tab and damages once the cops are done with me.”

“You’re all set, Cap,” the bartender said at once as the cops came out of the car with their guns drawn and leveled on the only target they could see worth the fuss. “We got your back!”

“Get down on your knees, sir!” one of the cops bellowed as his partner rolled out the cruiser’s back side and came up with a shotgun. “Get down! Hands in the air! Now!”

“Fuck,” the bartender said as the Happy Hour Herd caught sight of the pavement drama building outside and for some stupid reason decided that _this_ potential live-fire scenario, they all wanted to watch from up close. “We gotta have his back though,” he glanced at Sam. “They gotta know he didn’t do this. Right?”

“Yeah,” Sam sighed, tired already as the second and third cruisers screeched to a stop, and more cops dove out yelling. “Yeah, you’re right.”

This? This was gonna _suck_!

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Whoops! I did it again... (Mine is an evil laugh)


	5. Trigger

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A piece connected with a catch or indent as a means of releasing it.

It was almost a surprise, watching the gunman’s head evaporate through the scope. If the Soldier hadn’t had to brace himself against the Dragonov’s kick, he might almost have thought that the killing bullet had come from someone else’s gun. But no. He’d done it. He’d killed the shooter instead of taking his target down while all eyes were upon him. He’d done that…

_Why had he done that?_

The Soldier lurched back from the roof drain as the Captain whirled in place, blue eyes wide and fierce beneath a mask of blood from the cut above his brow. The gun mount collapsed to let the rifle slap flat to the roof along with him, rattling as though a heart thundered, and thoughts wheeled like birds inside it. He needed to break it down. He needed to go. There would be police soon. Possibly helicopters. The target would be on his guard, especially since the shooter had announced a Hydra bounty.

He hadn’t known there would be others. He hadn’t been told there would be assassins trying to take his kill for money. For _money_! For _Hydra_. His breath creaked in his throat, as if a whine were being strangled before it could escape.

Hydra.

He wrenched the scope from his Dragonov, and rolled to peer down at the street again. But instead of soldiers in black body armor mobbing the scene, there was only a dark skinned man easing the target to sit down and submit to first aid. Medic. Calm and efficient, unrattled at the sight of blood. Towels and jokes, and his name would be Gabriel, wouldn’t it? No, that wasn’t right. Gabe was radios, it should have been Jim.

The Soldier winced as pain blossomed like a fist behind his right eye. The scene wavered bizarrely as his stomach twisted, and he had to roll away again so that he wouldn’t risk vomiting near the downspout. Suddenly glad he hadn’t re-affixed his tracking mask, the Soldier tugged the grey undershirt out of his tac vest and pressed it to his face, breathing in the mingled scents that spoke of comfort, trust, and ease until the pain receded enough to allow reason through again.

Perhaps Lukin had not known Hydra would be involved. The Soldier had not heard directly from his Handler since leaving the safe house in Atlantic City two months ago. All queries, directives, and updates had come to him via text on a succession of disposable phones and pagers. Perhaps the man was as ignorant of the other players on this field as he had been of the nuances to the Winter Soldier’s control words. Or perhaps this was a test — some splintering of factions within the Red Room that turned assets to personal ends, rather than to the glory of the State. Or perhaps Lukin was dead, and some other intent lay behind the few directives the Soldier had received thus far.

Hydra… He took another deep breath through the cotton and pressed his eyes closed as the pain tried to surge over him again. The Soldier had shot Hydra agents in the past, this he knew, although he could not recall details just now. He knew there had been many… soldiers, spies, diplomats, scientists… There had been no great love between the Red Room and the descendants of the Red Skull’s Reich, surely, or else why would he remember so many of them as successful kills? Hydra did not deserve to kill the Captain — not the real one, nor his alpha body double either. The Soldier would not allow it!

He needed to leave. His blind would be found any moment. His gut roiled again, bringing up an acrid choke of ash, metal, and searing smoke in filthy air. _Go! Get out of here!_ The plates of his arm whirred and reset against themselves, as though restless and eager to be gone. And given the rapid convergence of sirens on his location, the Soldier knew he _should_ be gone -- a killing ghost that left no trace save rumor and fear, but… 

_No! Not without you!_

But Hydra. A bounty. That had to be important, it _had_ to be. How could it not change everything?

The Soldier knelt up, briskly disassembling the Dragonov into its separate bags and sleeves within the duffel, shucking his tac-vest and sliding a tattered, forgettable coat of army green over the top of his remaining uniform. He adopted the sloping, weary gait of a man who slept on the streets, (though not often or well,) and let it carry him over the roof's edge to the building’s fire escape. The ranging scope fit into the sleeve of his jacket, easily concealed, easily retrieved when he’d gone two flights down, and could stop to check his escape routes. 

Down in the street there was shouting. The hormones of conflict and aggression were a faint, simmering tang on the wind as several uniformed police herded the alpha Captain toward an armored ambulance, guns drawn and ready despite his clear lack of resistance to their commands. Even the medics in the ambulance looked embarrassed by the show, and the man who had first rendered aid to the Captain looked fit to slide into the Red himself as he argued with his own cadre of uniforms. Even the crowd of onlookers in the bar were calling insults with their phones aloft and recording.

But the Captain gave neither reply to the armed police, nor attention to the crowd as he walked calmly toward the ambulance, scanning the street around him as though the gun he couldn’t see was the one that would fire the bullet that killed him. Which… well… that had been the goal of the operation, hadn’t it? The Winter Soldier scowled though, unaccountably annoyed at the golden alpha’s seeming disregard for his immediate danger. Probably it was better than picking a fight with the police, but really, would a facile show of deference to the badges be too much to ask? At least someone had wiped the blood off his face.

But for some reason that just made it worse when suddenly, for no reason he could discern, the Captain turned in place, and stared the Soldier more or less directly in the scope. 

His mouth was open, as if scenting the wind, and his blue eyes squinting from the shadow of one raised hand. The pain shoved at the Soldier's eye again, making that hand’s shadow seem bluer, more complete over the man’s head; making the shielding hand into an ironic salute; making the slumped drape of the shooter’s body over the metal awning into a beetle black Hydra soldier’s failed ambush. The Soldier had to close his eyes, hold his breath, hold absolutely still until the urge to vomit, or to scream, or to destroy something beautiful passed.

 _Too far. No clarity. He has no scope. He will only see you if you run,_ the Soldier told himself, heart thundering in his breast with something that was unreasonably like terror. It had been an accident of angles, only. A chance moment mistaken for disaster. The Captain was even now climbing into the ambulance to have his superficial wounds tended to, and when that was done, they would take him to wherever it was that police did their interrogations of shooting victims in this city. He had not spotted the Soldier, surely, or there would have been some sound of pursuit. So the Soldier was safe.

Still, it was several long heartbeats before he could open his aching eyes and look to be sure.

The phone in his breast pocket buzzed once, startling a hiss from him as he jerked in place. His metal hand crumpled the ranging scope before he could restrain the flinch. The Soldier growled at his own carelessness as glass tinkled through his fingers to rain down to the street. _Trace evidence. Damn it._

The phone buzzed again, three times in quick succession, and then it buzzed steadily for five seconds.

 _Report,_ the code meant. _ASAP. Verbal contact._

Which meant that if the Soldier did not make the call within five minutes, the phone in his hand would ring, and he would be expected to answer, and listen to Lukin’s clumsy attempts at using control words he’d clearly never been trained to. Five minutes. He could possibly find and remove all the glass in that time, if no one disturbed him.

The Captain was talking to the medic in the ambulance far below, still ignoring the police as the other medic argued with them at the tavern's bloodied door. The police had begun to try and clear their unwanted audience out of camera range, and no one at all was looking the Soldier's way. 

Or he could find a way to keep tracking his quarry as he had planned to do this morning, the Soldier decided, crushing the phone in his fist with far less concern than he'd had the ranging scope. He would maintain his planned check-in schedule and contact methods, and claim ignorance and equipment failure if questioned later tonight on this minor deviance from protocol. This kill was his. His alone, and until he chose to take it, the Winter Soldier would allow no other to steal it from him.

Now he just needed to work out how to get onto the roof of the ambulance without being seen...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yeah, I know.  
> Not sorry though.


	6. Badge

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A device or token, especially of membership in a society or group.

Natasha's phone went crazy before she'd taken five steps from the shielded meeting room. It buzzed against her thigh like an angry wasp as wave after wave of notifications shook her pocket. The vibrations were was loud enough that two of the legal department interns who’d also been trapped in the hours-long and utterly pointless debrief looked at her in alarm.

She allowed a flicker of annoyance to show on her face as she fished it out and slowed to let them outstrip her. Natasha had suspected that bullshit meeting had been a sequestering tactic of some kind, but she’d assumed it just meant that Steve was getting a Talking To from Fury, who wouldn't want Natasha there to complicate his dominance dynamics. This panicked barrage happening in her hand made her think otherwise however. She turned her shoulder to the wall as she woke the screen with a thumbprint and eyescan, making sure the corridor camera would catch no glimpse of the messages while she caught up.

The notification balloons erupted in a strobe of panic she could all but hear. They were all texts from Stark. 

_T — Why aren’t you answering your phone?_  
_T — Romanoff._  
_T — WTF is going on out there?_  
_T — JARVIS picked up a DC Metro dispatch to Cap’s dive bar! I know you know about this! You have to know!_

“Fuck,” Natasha muttered, a surge of anger warming her chest and throat. This was what they’d wanted to keep her from responding to. Oh, she was going to make Fury _pay_ for this one! She swept on to the next panicked bubble in the stack.

_T — Nat, there’s video hitting twitter!_  
_T — Some rando nutjob with an AK47 shot up the street._  
_T — No audio, but witnesses are tweeting about a Hydra bounty._  
_T — Hydra, Nat!_

The heat of her rage drowned in a cold wash of fear. A bounty? A _public_ bounty? The Hydra she remembered from her days in the Red Room would never have been so bold. It had been barely a shadow in the shallows where the deep players swam. How could they have risen to strike a target so well lit, so well known as Captain America? And Steve dealing with an active shooter all alone? He would — he absolutely would — but if he was the shooter's target all along, how was Stark the one telling her about it? And why only now?

Her phone buzzed again, nagging her attention back to her hand.

 _T — Pick up!_  
_T — Or text me back!_  
_T — So help me, I **will** come straight out there to DC right now, don’t think I won’t!_

Another came through just as she was tapping the reply button.  
_T — Fuck this meeting. I’m coming now._

 _Was in a clean room meeting._ she hurried to type, trying to project rational calm in as few words as possible. _No phones. What happened?_

Get Stark talking. Stop him from jumping off a cliff of bad choices. Keep him from locking target on whatever he could see to blame for his fright. Even if he was dictating to Jarvis, Tony would at least have to slow his roll enough to form words.

_T — STEVE GOT SHOT!_

She hadn’t been ready for that. No. Actually, she had been. She just hadn’t _wanted_ to be ready for it.

Natasha stared up at the hallway camera, and let the monitor clock her readiness to commit grievous bodily harm — just a little matter of fair warning against any SHIELD personnel trying to stall her further. Then she turned and strode for the stairwell that would take her to the server room, where the magnetic fields were too strong for any electronic monitoring, the mainframes too loud for microphones, and the room too cold for agents to casually eavesdrop.

 _… Call me in 5._ she texted back, not bothering to tell him he shouldn't come. He was probably halfway to DC already, and Natasha had a feeling she’d get farther with Tony Stark safely at her side than if she took on the investigation and rescue operations alone. 

For now though, this was definitely _not_ a conversation she wanted to have with her thumbs.

***

“Well now, see he’s your beta though, isn’t he?” the detective said with the air of explaining something simple to an idiot. “Your backup guy, your right hand man, right? ‘Course we gotta ask how he fits into all this. Especially since we got a dead guy to account for tonight.” 

“For the last time,” Steve said to the ceiling in as polite a tone as he could muster, “I can’t tell you where Hawkeye is right now, because I don’t _know_ where Hawkeye is right now.” It wasn’t actually a very polite tone.

The detective shifted in his chair, as if the repeated answer had revealed a slip in Steve’s story that they hadn’t been over already. “Then if you don’t know where he is, how can you be sure he didn’t murder-”

“I don’t know where he _is_ , because he’s on _assignment_ , and I don’t have _clearance_ to know where he is,” He was almost too tired to growl anymore, “and _neither do you_ Detective Yancey. So if you actually want to get an answer to that question, you need to get an officer with Top Secret clearance to contact SHIELD about it, and quit wasting all of our time here!” Huh. Not too tired to shout, it seemed. Steve rubbed his eyes, and sighed at the smug silence that rolled off the cop. Getting him to yell had definitely been part of the plan, that much was clear, and Steve could only guess that meant they expected he’d start to change things and forget details now he was het up.

As if he hadn’t arrived at the station that way in the first place.

Steve sighed, thought of Sam, the beta who’d backed him up with the woman at the bar, then tried to shove him clear when the alpha came back shooting, and did his best to patch Steve up afterward. None of it asked, expected, or demanded of him; all of it offered anyhow, because he was a good man who didn’t need to be asked to be decent. Like the bartender was a good man. Like most of the people inside that bar were good men, for whom the notion of drugging someone, kidnapping them, raping them, or killing the one who prevented you from doing all that for a rumored bounty would never have crossed their minds. Steve wondered if somewhere in the precinct HQ, some other detective was giving Sam as hard a time as Yancey here was giving him. Or maybe an even worse one, considering his race and designation, and the fact that Steve’s fame had to be shielding him from at least a little of the nonsense.

For Sam’s sake, Steve took a deep breath and tried again. “I don’t know who the shooter was -”

“But you somehow know it wasn’t Hawkeye.”

“I meant the man who shot _me_ , Detective.” Steve slid one withering glare his way — a brief one, so he wouldn’t be too tempted to punch a hole in the wall at the contempt that met his gaze — then went back to examining the ceiling. “First time I met him was earlier that afternoon, at the bar.”

“When you claim-”

“Where _several witnesses_ saw him harassing the woman-”

“Whose name you can’t provide.”

“Whose privacy I respected, given that she’d just been nearly assaulted by a stranger, and didn’t feel too safe just then.” Were they _trying_ to drive him into Red with all this monkeyshine? “She didn’t know the creep, and she didn’t know me, or the other guy sitting between us. We all kinda felt like her boundaries had been pushed far enough just then.”

“So-”

“So no, I can’t provide her name.”

The detective leaned over the table, a dark blur in the corner of Steve’s eye, with a starchy, acrid eagerness underlying the scent of his chummy aftershave. “And would you provide it if you had it?” he asked, “If she were maybe connected to the murder in some way?”

Steve put all four legs of his chair carefully on the floor, and let his gaze settle on the Detective’s face for a very. Long. Time.

The woman had been in a car, blocks away when the alpha had tried to assassinate him. There was no way she could be involved in the shooting, but she’d clearly been a worker on the Hill — her scent had carried that marble-dust and carpet shampoo tint that haunted all the Federal buildings up there. And well… even in Steve’s younger days, before the post war girl-boom, the idea of a woman — so rare, and so precious in humanity’s numbers — boldly at work in a man’s world had been hard for some men to swallow. Vulnerable, valuable, and far from the sheltered niches their ‘protectors’ preferred for them, those bold, masterful women who fought free of their shelter to stride the halls of power had rarely found many allies there. And it was starting to look as if that had changed less in the modern day than Steve had hoped it would have.

“No,” he said at last, with a mental salute in Peggy’s direction, “I don’t think I would.”

Yancey’s face clouded. “Captain, a man’s been shot today-”

“Two men,” Steve reminded him, because although the wound was knitting already under the bandage the EMTs had put on it, it still fucking stung.

“A man _died_ today. We need to find who was responsible for-”

“And yet, I can’t help noticing you’re not out there doing that right now!” Whoops. There went the shouting again. Darn it.

“You were having a violent confrontation with the victim at the time of his murder!” Yancey shouted back, eyes hard and narrow.

“Unarmed! In full view of at least twenty people, and every CTV camera on the damned block!” Steve roared, “Most of whom will also remember that the _shooter_ was talking openly about collecting a HYDRA bounty on my head, so maybe you wanna-”

The room lights flashed off, and quickly back on again, and Steve choked down the rest of the rant he’d been spinning up to let off on the man. Someone up the chain of command wanted a word, and they didn’t want Steve to overhear anything. SHIELD used the same signal in their interrogation rooms, and the flicker of frustrated rage that Yancey couldn’t manage to hide as he turned for the door proved it out. Steve folded his arms and tipped his chair back to lean against the wall, watching the Detective as he gathered his coat, pad, and pen and stormed out the door.

This, Steve decided, was just about enough. Turning his face upward again, he made eye contact with the camera they’d tried to hide in the air vent, and announced that fact to anybody who might be listening.

“I’m still here because I care about what happened today,” he said, low and rumbling mad, and not caring to conceal it. “I’m cooperating because justice being done is important to me, but this?” He waved a disdainful hand at the cramped, gritty little interrogation room, and every indignity that had gone on in the hours he’d been sitting in it, “This isn’t justice. And I’m about done being polite about it.”

“About time, Cap,” said a petite, mousy haired woman as she slung the door wide and let herself, the Detective, and… Happy Hogan in, “I’d have punched someone about twenty minutes in, if what I’ve been hearing about all this is true. Jennifer Walters,” She grinned and offered her hand to shake as he got automatically to his feet. “Stark Industries’ Legal department. I’d like to represent you from here on out, if you’re okay with that.”

“Represent me?” Steve blinked, shaking her hand more out of reflexive courtesy than any actual feeling of welcome, “Am I under arrest?”

Walters’ smile went gleefully sharp. “Well now that is an _excellent_ question, Captain,” she said, and turned back to the doorway, where Detective Yancey stood glowering between two men in much better suits, “ _Is_ Captain Rogers being charged with a crime?”

Yancey shifted, but the man on his right spoke up first. “It’s too early in the investigation for an arrest just yet. This is just an initial interview to-”

“So he’s free to go then?”

“The Captain hasn’t requested attorney presence, Miss Walters,” the second man said, unctuous and condescending at once, “His cooperation has been entirely voluntary. And since he has yet to confirm your representation, so I’m going to have to ask you to stop trying to interfere in our investigation.”

“Had been,” Steve pointed out. “My cooperation _had_ been voluntary. That was before you spent five hours talking in circles, and treating me like a terrorist. I’m about all out of good will at this point, and I’d very much like _my Lawyer_ to be a part of any further questions you fellas feel you need to ask me. In fact,” he took the Detective’s abandoned chair, turned it around, and straddled it pointedly so he could brace his arms over the back and glare, “I have a few questions of my own I’d like to get answered.”

“Ooh, let’s make a list,” Walters perked, slipping around Steve to take the second good chair, and leaving the hard, ricketty suspect’s chair emphatically empty. “Starting with the warrant you officers must have gotten before you tried to unlock and search the Captain’s phone.”

Steve felt the outrage curl off him like a wave of heat, and though he managed to keep his seat, all three of the cops in the doorway flinched back from the look he turned on them. “What?” He asked in an entirely reasonable tone, given the circumstances.

“System security picked up a tamper alert on your unit about four and a half hours ago, Cap,” Hogan spoke up, sounding as if the only thing that would make his experience better might be some popcorn and a coke. “Someone cracked the case without using your all-clear password first. Triggered it to lockdown, and sent a GPS distress ping with your location. Which is when the Boss sent me and Miss Walters to pick you up.”

Suit on the left coughed, a sour curl of alarm simmering through his scent as he stepped closer to the door. “To the best of my knowledge, Captain Rogers’ phone should be with the rest of his personal effects, just where he left it.”

“Yes,” Walters purred, writing out ‘No Warrant For Phone’ on her legal pad in large block letters, “It should be, shouldn’t it? So when you surrender it back to the Captain, I’m sure the tamper lockdown Mr. Hogan mentioned won’t be in effect at all, will it? Now what question would you like to ask next, Captain?”

“Where’s Sam?” The cops looked at each other warily, and Steve’s temper spiked just that much higher. “Sam is the man who helped me after I was _shot_ today. I saw your officers putting him in a cruiser when the ambulance was leaving the scene, and I want to know if you’ve got him in another room like this, with another asshole like him trying to make it out like he did something wrong instead of saving someone’s goddamned life today!”

“Oh yeah,” Hogan snapped his fingers in sudden understanding. “That dude. Um… Wilson? Yeah. Wilson. He lawyered up about four hours ago, then called Avengers HQ and told Jarvis what went down here today. The team’s having a meeting with SHIELD legal, Homeland Security, and the DoJ about how to handle the joint investigation.”

The suit on the right scowled, even as his scent went starkly white. “Jurisdiction on this case is clearly-”

Miss Walters put her fist delicately over her mouth and coughed, “Hydra!”

Steve felt — literally felt his vision narrow on Yancey, every other living creature in the room made instantly irrelevant. “You said,” he managed through his teeth, “you were charging him…”

Yancey backed a step, color draining from his face. “I… you… mighta got that impression from-”

Then Steve was on his feet, his chair clattering hard into the wall as he gripped the door frame hard to stop his rush. “Excuse me, please,” he said to the three cops, who were now all pressed back against the opposite wall, faces turned aside, eyes cut toward him in helpless alarm. “I need a moment.” Then he shut the thick steel door in their faces. 

Then he punched the door, instead of their faces. 

It wasn’t nearly as satisfying, but probably less complicated, overall.

***

“I’m on it,” was the first thing Natasha said after accepting the call, “He’s ok. Minor injuries, but he’s ok enough for the EMTs to let him debrief with DCMP at the station, instead of a hospital room. So he’s ok. How is Bristol?” 

“A wretched hive of scum and villainy,” Phil replied at once, mild as a hurricane’s eye. “Why is he debriefing with police instead of SHIELD?”

Not having the means to answer that question to the satisfaction of either one of them, Natasha ignored it. “Shooter’s public records are unremarkable,” she said, checking her tablet as another text came through from Stark. “Edgar Lascombe, 32, Alpha, Virginia native. He’s a minor thug with a few arrests in the area, but not much jail time. I haven’t found any connections to the IC, but I’m still looking.”

“That name drop was oddly specific for a minor thug without Intelligence connections,” Phil observed, and she winced.

“Heard about that, did you?”

“It’s trending on Twitter, Natasha. I suspect the Queen has heard about it.”

“Well, tell her we’re looking into it. Stark’s got JARVIS combing the webs for any actual evidence of a bounty offer or hit transaction, I’m checking my contacts as quickly as they get back to me, and —”

“And who’s keeping Stark from chewing holes in the plaster?” Phil asked, almost as if he knew the man. Or were part of the Omega trio that anchored the whole pack together or something. Natasha couldn’t help a fond smile, accompanied by a fervent wish that her husband — both of them, actually, — could be there without having to go AWOL from an active operation to do it.

“Molesting the CTV network is keeping him occupied for now,” she said. “That, and yelling because Fury won’t let him hack the police records on the investigation.”

Phil made a wondering noise. “Fury can stop him?”

“With Potts on his side, he can,” she answered with fond chuckle. “For now. Have you told Clint yet?”

“Clint told me about it,” Phil parried, and came back with a savage riposte. “Have _you_ told Banner yet?”

“No,” Natasha refused so adamantly she couldn’t help shaking her head. “No thank you. Him and Thor are fine wherever they are, whatever they’re doing. There’s nothing about this needing smashing, or electrocution just yet. We’ve… “ She reached down inside her, where the well of calm detachment she made do service for surety lived, and drew on it until she could be sure her voice would neither waver, rumble, not whine as she promised what they both knew she could not guarantee. “We’ve got this, Phil.”

“When you say ‘we,” he murmured, fond and implacable, “why do I get the feeling Hill and Fury aren’t included?”

 _I wish I damned well knew!_ Natasha didn’t say. The brush off they’d gotten from the Director about the whole Hydra question still galled at her. Because yes, it could be nonsense that any smartass neo nazi with a passing knowledge of Cap’s history would fling at him to try and throw him off balance, but. _But what if it wasn’t?_ Telling Phil, and through him Clint however, would not keep her husbands’ focus on the operation they’d been assigned to, or the team they were there to lead. And they _were_ handling it, her and Stark. Until Steve got back, they were handling it. It would be fine. 

So she shoved her frustration down deep in the well and let the shape of a smile be heard in her reply. “You know Fury, Boss — He never shows his hand till he’s about to call and take the pot, and well, Stark doesn’t have the poker face for that kind of game.”

He made a considering hum. “Yours is usually better, Natasha.”

And yes, of course he could see through her. That was what too-wise Omega husbands did, wasn’t it? But Phil knew the stakes as well as she did, and he knew she wouldn’t take this — any of this — lightly. So she let the challenge pass without comment. Almost. “I miss you guys.”

“That’s because you’re not spending enough time at the range,” Phil answered, the love in his voice a warmth she could feel under her ribs. “Do some shooting with Clint and I when we get home, and I have faith you’ll dial it in quickly.” He cut the call then, which was good, because Natasha’s ugly laugh that was maybe a little bit ugly stress cry too did _not_ need a witness just then.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As usual, my Arsenical Apple tarts, comments are life, and kudoes are joy, and all mistakes are mine, they are mine, they are beautiful, and they are mine.  
> Thanks for reading!


	7. Release

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The point in the stroke of an engine at which the exhaust port or valve is opened.

“Now that was a thing of beauty!” As if from a distance, Steve heard Walters’ delighted chuckle, just an edge of adrenaline hilarity laced through it as he uncurled his fist from the dent he’d made in the interrogation room door. “It’s like they all forgot they had guns!”

Hogan’s murmur, though more concerned, seemed no closer, “You okay there, Cap?”

“That’s why I stayed,” he whispered to the door, his aching fist, the dent, and the cops who probably weren’t waiting in the hallway behind it anymore. “So they wouldn’t try and make it all Sam’s fault. That was why I…”

“They’re allowed to lie to you in here, Captain” Walters’ voice was level now, grave and smooth, and bitter as Pernod - all trace of amusement evaporated like smoke from a glass. “It’s a gross misuse of their authority, and it leads to miscarriages of justice far more often than otherwise, but it’s not technically against any law, rule, or ordinance. That’s why Miss Potts sent us to rescue you.”

“Miss Potts?” Steve turned, startled neatly out of his slide toward the Red. “I thought Tony… the Team…?”

“Oh, they wanted to come, Cap, trust me,” Hogan replied with a rueful grin, “Took some talkin’ to convince them doing it would only make every single thing about this worse, but eventually cooler heads prevailed. And here we are!” He spread his hands wide, then gave a mock-cheerful clap. “Now all we need’s a deck of cards.”

“Unless I miss my guess, we don’t even have time for a hand of five card stud,” Walters snorted. “I’ve already collected online public footage of both confrontations you had with Mr. Lascombe, _with_ clear audio, from at least six different angles, I’ve got an affidavit from the bartender, and I’ve tagged the DCMP on all of it. Only reason they’re not already back with your personal items right now is probably because they can’t figure out how to put your phone back together.”

Steve let his forehead drop against the door, and let as much of the breath out of his body as he could. “You…” he swallowed, took a breath, and tried again. “Not that I’m not grateful, because I am, but… you shouldn’t have to do this.”

“You’re right, Cap,” Walters said, and Steve heard the chair scrape back as she stood, “I shouldn’t. And in a perfect world, Stark Industries wouldn’t need to keep a criminal defense lawyer like me on retainer to do exactly this kind of interference, but… well, I guess in a perfect world, we also wouldn’t have needed a super soldier to fight super nazis either, would we?” She patted his good shoulder with a boldness Steve didn’t expect from a stranger. He supposed lawyers had to be daring, in their own way, but he suspected most would still have preferred to stay out of reach of an alpha mad enough to dent a steel door. She had that same kind of steady green, resinous, slightly bitter smell to her as Bruce did — hers softened with a blurry edge of vanilla and old books, where his held an edge of mildew and loam. It was a reliable sort of smell, and it reached smoothly in under Steve’s Red and coaxed him back toward the air with small, but firm hands

He let her draw him away from the door with only a little grumble. “I just thought, since I’d done nothing wrong, and I had nothing to hide, helping them here would be the right thing to do…”

Hogan made a noise like he’d choked on spit, but Walters? She smirked right in his face. “You're adorable,” she told him. “Never change. Well okay, do change that shirt please, because orange is so completely not your color, and why are you even dressed like an inmate right now anyway?”

“The Medics had to cut my shirt off to treat the wound, and I… “ Steve shied away from mentioning the undershirt he’d he’d had to leave the TV studio without that morning. “This was what they brought me when we got here?” Steve plucked the thin, garish fabric away from his chest and peered down at it appraisingly. “I thought someone must have just left it in the lost and found or something. It _is_ pretty darned ugly.”

Walters’ grin got, if possible, even more delighted. “Oho, my good Captain, are we ever going to make that swing-and-miss of a psych out work for us! Especially with the crowd of reporters who are waiting outside the building right now, in hopes of getting a statement.” 

Steve groaned, and dropped his head into both hands, “I don’t want to talk to any more reporters,” he groaned. 

Walters just patted his shoulder again. “You won’t have to say a word, Captain. This god awful loaner shirt will do all the talking for you. Though… you gotta promise me you’ll burn this thing when you get back to a civilized wardrobe, okay? Because that stain all down the back is just manky. What even is that anyway? No, wait,” she held up a hand, forestalling the detail Steve hadn’t been going to offer anyway, “I just decided I don't want to know. Ah, Detective Yancey,” she pivoted abruptly on her heel, bright and sharp as a juggler’s knife as the door creaked warily open again, “We were just talking about you.”

Yancey had returned alone, his face schooled to rigid neutrality, while his scent seethed a welter of chastened fury. Several ziplock bags hung from his hands, and Steve couldn’t help but notice that his sidearm was no longer clipped to his belt. He didn’t look at Walters, nor at Steve, who stood up to retrieve his belongings, but instead turned swiftly to hand the bags to Hogan, who was nearer to the door, a beta, and not someone he’d been actively goading for hours. “That’s everything.” He managed to say the words without sounding like they were choking him, and Steve found himself honestly surprised.

“I assume my client is free to go now?” Walters asked with savage sweetness, drawing the Detective’s glare out of hiding for the briefest of moments.

Then he drew himself up, looked pointedly past the lawyer’s shoulder, and managed a civil nod. “We’ll be in touch if we have any more questions.”

“I’ll meet you out front with the car in a minute, Captain,” Hogan said, making a point of shifting the bags in his hand so that the one with the pieces of Steve’s phone in it lay on top of the others.

“The Commissioner wants you to leave by the secure entrance around the back,” Yancey hurried to say before Hogan could leave. “Since there’s a shooter at large and all.” _And a crowd of reporters outside the front,_ he very clearly did not add, though everyone in the room seemed to hear it anyhow.

Hogan’s face took on just a shade of Walters’ aggressive glee as he threw airily back, “Oh, it’s okay Detective, the limo’s got hardened armor. Anything shy of a rocket launcher, and we’ll probably be okay.”

Yancey’s face darkened again, and Steve suddenly found himself absolutely through with it all. Every single bit of it was now entirely more than he could take without whining for escape. He suppressed the urge, and the omega instinct he could feel welling up inside him, and spoke up. “Armor only works once you’re inside it, Happy,” he said, playing up a wince as he rolled his healing shoulder, “I’ve already been shot today, and I’d really like to just get home without any more hullaballoo.”

Pity surged briefly through Hogan’s scent, but his expression remained all affable cheer as he tossed a sloppily ironic salute Steve’s way. “Right, Cap. One ride home, no hullaballoo.”

“I, however, am neither tired, injured, nor phased at all by a bit of hullaballoo,” Walters announced as she shouldered her bag and straightened the lapels of her jacket. “And since my car’s on a meter out front, I’ll just head out that way on my own.” She turned to Steve, one hand brandishing her business card, the other offered to shake. “Give me a call when you get your new phone up and running, Captain, and we’ll talk more about today.”

“Will do,” he said, and meant it, for all he was _extremely_ glad that the conversation would be on the other side of several hours’ worth of sleep.

***

Eventually, Pepper just gave up and texted. * _Agent Romanoff, is everything all right over there?_ *

The reply was as swift as it was curt, neither attribute surprising. * _Fine, Potts. News on Steve?_ * Because of course she’d have guessed Pepper had information she wanted — she wouldn’t expect less from the Black Widow.

* _Yes,_ * she texted back, seeing no need to be coy about it. * _Happy tells me Captain Rogers has been released, and they’ll be at the apartment within half an hour._ *

The next reply took a little longer, and it was hard not to imagine Romanoff hunched breathless and trembling over her phone in a darkened room, eyes closed against the sudden release of fear. Would her eyes be too bright when she managed a reply? * _Thank you. Seriously, Potts, thank you._ * Pepper thought they would be.

* _Thank me by telling me why Tony isn’t answering my texts please,_ * she sent back, brusque now the first half of her business had been handled. * _It’s worrying when he goes quiet._ *

Natasha took a few moments to reply — which was, admittedly a little nerve wracking. * _Hyperfocus?_ * Which was a much better answer than the ‘I have no idea where he went or who he’s antagonizing right now’ that Pepper had almost begun to dread. * _He’s on the roof atm, scaring Steve’s HoA and arguing with Jarvis’s search results._ *

And didn’t that just kill the budding relief in Pepper’s own heart? * _The roof?_ * she sent back, * _Is that safe with a sniper out there gunning for the Captain?_ *

* _He’s in the armor._ * She could almost hear the smugness curling around those words, and Pepper did not find it cute.

* _That’s not a ‘yes’._ *

* _You’re right, it isn’t._ * Well, at least she didn’t try and equivocate? * _But the sniper — or lack of one — is actually what they’re arguing about. Jarvis can’t find any trace of a paying contract on Steve._ *

And that was definitely a surprise Pepper hadn’t expected to hear. * _But the gunman was very clear,_ * she sent back.

* _and apparently he was rolling on hormones and Internet rumors, because that’s literally all we can find about it anywhere._ * The dots balanced in place for awhile on the tail of that message, so Pepper held her protests and questions back to see what else would be coming. * _The earliest mention of anything like a contract hit on Steve is buried in a reddit thread that appeared during the Battle of Manhattan, wondering if it was the same Cap or a new one, and if Hydra would be coming back too. It was a joke wondering whether they’d adjust for inflation when they took out a hit on him if he was the real deal._ *

Pepper chewed her lip at the pure banality of it. * _And Tony’s not satisfied with Jarvis’s conclusion._ * she sent back, knowing she wouldn’t be needing the question mark.

* _It’s like you know him or something._ *

Pepper couldn’t help smiling at that, though it didn’t involve anything like happiness. * _It’s like I know him._ * she agreed. * _Tony would be laughing this off in front of the press if that rumored hit was on him, you know. I’ve seen him do it before. More than once or twice._ *

The dots balanced again, far longer than the shortness of the reply required. * _But pack is different._ * and oh, could Pepper read the baffled, nervy confusion tangled in those words, * _or so I’m discovering._ * Because of course Romanoff wouldn’t be any better versed in how to deal with a throng of needy boys in constant intimacy than Pepper was herself. The mere thought of not just someone, but several someones under her emotional feet at every turn made Pepper want to scream and run, but somehow the Widow, for all her fame revolved around being at her most dangerous when made vulnerable, had chosen this for herself.

For the life of her, Pepper couldn’t see why. * _That’s what I’ve been told too,_ * she sent back after a moment. * _But what if the rumors are true? What if there is a sniper gunning for Captain America? How much danger does that put Tony in with the Avengers split up and sent…_ * to another state? to another country? To another damned planet? * _away?_ * she managed eventually. 

Romanoff’s reply came back, quick and unsatisfying. * _I can’t quantify that, Potts. Too many unknowns._ * Pepper got the idea that bothered Natasha as much as it did herself.

She could quantify it herself though, and Pepper wasn’t afraid to say so. * _Tony’s alone in New York,_ * she sent. * _All the rest of you are paired up at least, but not him. You’re hours away at best if anything goes wrong, and he has no one but Jarvis to help him in the moment. That’s not exactly a bad hand to play, but I still can’t help thinking that puts Tony out on a limb._ *

* _We know,_ * came the reply. * _We’ve all mentioned that to him._ *

Well that was good to know at least. Still… * _And he’s blown you all off, hasn’t he?_ *

* _He said he wants to stay where the pack formed. So we’d have a home to come back to._ * As if any pack would consider not coming to their Omega, wherever he happened to go wandering. But that was Tony for you; never quite sure of anything he hadn’t had to buy.

* _But he’s not safe there by himself, is he?_ * Pepper pressed, as if she needed the confirmation.

* _Is he safe anywhere?_ * Well, it wasn’t a no, but it might as well have been.

And it made Pepper’s mind up neatly. * _He’ll be safer here in Malibu._ *

* _Will he?_ * And wasn’t it odd how Pepper could almost hear that the question had been hopeful, rather than dubious?

* _He will,_ * she replied, feeling the surety of it settle around her shoulders. *I’ll bring him out here once he’s done in DC. It’s no more difficult for the rest of you to get here than to NYC, and Tony’s got history here. Friends. Support. Memories.*

The dots balanced again. Pepper imagined several replies composed and deleted in the time it took Romanoff to send, * _He’ll go if you tell him to? Just like that?_ * 

See? Hopeful. Pepper smiled. 

* _Unless his pack objects, he will,_ * she sent back a gentle challenge, that was at least halfway an invitation to allegiance. * _Are you objecting?_ * Because Pepper had confidence in her leverage over Tony on his own, but she’d have been a fool not to at least try and get the Widow onto her side of things as well.

This time no dots balanced. This time a blank white silence kept her waiting for just long enough that Pepper could be sure Natasha was considering the matter carefully. * _No,_ * came the reply at last, * _I don’t think I am._ *

And that, Pepper figured, was all either of them needed to say on the matter.

***

“Is it just me,” Steve mused, staring out the tinted window as the limo pulled past the at the station’s front entrance, where the gathered reporters thronged like moths around Walters’ tiny form, “or is that gal a whole lot bigger than she looks?” 

Happy just laughed. “Ain’t just you, Pal. Get her on a tear, and Jen Walters will give the Hulk a run for his money. She’ll see you all right with all this business though. Your buddy Wilson too, if he calls back to take the offer to represent him.”

“I really hope he won’t need it,” Steve sighed, jaw cracking in a sudden yawn as the weight of the day began to catch up to him. He’d been informed that, on account of the lateness of the hour, and the mania of his packmates, Happy was allowed to bring him back to the apartment instead of straight to the Tryskelion for a wound check and debrief on the escaped second shooter. Natasha must have managed that one… or maybe Tony, Fury took world security seriously, but it was damned hard to stop those two from getting their way when they got dug in after it. “Decent fella like him doesn’t deserve all that.” 

“Neither does a decent fella like you, Cap,” Happy pointed out. “If it makes you feel better about it though, you’re the celebrity here. Wilson is chump change by comparison. Oh, I don’t mean it like that,” he hastened to assure, once he caught Steve’s disapproving glare in the rear view mirror, “It’s just for a cop like ol Yancey there, a beta scapegoat’s just traction on the alpha they really want. Boss has had this happen before, you know; cop shops sometimes act like they get a gold star or something whenever they can pin a mess to a big name everyone knows. Wilson’s just a step in that direction for them.”

“We had literally just met that day,” Steve grizzled, almost too tired to rise to the outrage of it again.

“Hey, I didn’t say it made sense, did I?” Happy turned them onto the Beltway with a burst of speed, and somehow slotted the big car neatly into the pressing traffic. “It’s like they think if they just dig hard enough, they'll find something you did wrong so they can make themselves look good. They do that to regular folks too, when they get lazy, but if you got a name in the press, it's always worse. Believe me, I've seen it before. Gettin' you off their radar might be the only way they actually bother to look for the creep who DID shoot that dumb kid outside the club.”

 _Guess nothing ever really changes,_ Steve thought, memories rising sour and sad through his exhaustion. Dance hall raids and doors kicked in on the strength of prejudice, greed, or just rumor alone in the starving streets of Red Hook and Vinegar Hill. Harlem, everyone had known, was ten times worse for that kind of thing. He’d thought — he’d hoped — that the war, what it had cost, what it had revealed to the world, might have made those in power take it all a little more seriously, but… well, as Walters had said… 

_In a perfect world, we wouldn’t need super soldiers._

Steve closed his eyes on that thought, and focused on counting the scarlet glow of passing streetlights that counted down the seconds between him and Home.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Still having fun? Thoughts? Notions? Death threats? Marriage proposals? Speak! You know I value your thoughts, my dearest Precious Puff-Adders!


	8. Hide

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A shelter, a concealment, or an empty skin.

“Steve,” Tony mumbled, lips pressed tight against salty skin and grimy medical tape, his ribs aching under the weight of muscle-taut arms that couldn’t hold him tight enough even if they broke him. And he hadn’t intended to say that — Steve’s name, sighed out like some witless romance heroine — he hadn’t meant to say anything. Or, well, he meant to say a lot of things, at high volume, with a lot of sass to cover the way his voice had been shaking ever since Jarvis had interrupted Tony’s meeting in New York with news of the shooting, but… But then the giant blond lump of recklessly stupid alpha had come shuffling into his own apartment looking like a convict, and smelling like blood and despair, and Tony had just… “God, Steve.”

“I’m here,” Steve murmured against the top of his head, lips pressed tight to his curls and surely making a mess of his style, but his breath was warm and living and _real_ against Tony’s scalp, and it only made Tony clutch that awful fucking shirt tighter, “I’m here, Tony. I’m okay.”

That was when Natasha started cussing. Also, to judge from the sudden flinch Steve gave under Tony’s weight, she started hitting him too. Tony worked free of Steve’s hug, but only enough to turn his head and glare at her. Steve whipped one arm out though, and snagged the furious woman — who, they all knew, would never have been caught if she hadn’t been willing to be reeled in struggling and spitting, to join Steve’s doorstep hug along with Tony. She didn’t soften into it until Tony got an arm around her waist too though, because, as they’d all come to learn since the pack had bonded, Natasha did _not_ easily forgive being frightened.

“Stupid,” Tony heard her mutter against Steve’s chest before jabbing one more cramped-but-savage punch into his side. Then she was hugging too, and her grip on them both was a fierce one.

Steve grunted at the hit, gripped them both straining tight for a breathless second, and then let go — not of Tony or Natasha, but of himself. His scent — his natural scent — bloomed around them all at once, as though he’d been holding it in like a scream and he hadn’t felt safe enough to voice in weeks. Steve had walked into the apartment all but null, smelling more of the clothes someone had dressed him in than himself, but now, all at once, he was really _there_ — sorrow and anger and frustration simmering off him like steam as he trembled between them and muttered, “I have had a _really_ bad day, guys…”

“Should’ve come to the gym with me,” Natasha replied, warm and wry, and blooming rose red with relief as she hooked a thumb over Tony’s belt. “Stupid.”

“Hey, cut him a break,” Tony found himself rising to the jab with a severe, if not very serious glower, “You know Steve can’t help his Nazi Punching compulsion.”

“In my defense,” Steve began, but Tony got a finger over his lips at once.

“Nope! Shh!” he said, pressing the words into silence, “No explanations! Those come later.”

“Later?” Steve sniffed, but he was already half smiling.

“Yes, later.” Tony insisted, twisting his grip on the awful orange prison shirt so he could drag the thing upward and disrupt the whole tangle of them in service to getting that offensive rag right _off_. “First, we need to get you clean.”

“Stark’s right,” Natasha added, hauling on the shirt from her side with just enough force to rip the thin, shitty fabric as it came up over Steve’s shoulders. The shredding sound was so deeply satisfying that Tony put some extra twist into it from his side too. “You stink, Steve.” Natasha made a face, and whipped the rag toward the fireplace they’d started earlier. “You reek of other people’s incompetence, and you need to go let Tony wash it all off you.” Which was nice, as support from his packmate went, but it was also a far cry from the shit Natasha had been giving Tony when he’d been making preparations earlier that day. 

“You definitely should,” Tony agreed, giving her a skeptical eyebrow as she leaned in with a wink to help him get Steve moving toward the bathroom

“I don’t need help in the shower guys,” Steve grumbled, even as he let himself be herded, “I’m not _that_ hurt… oh…?” He stopped short in the hallway, staring over his shoulder into the second bedroom, just as if he didn’t have two fully grown adults trying to keep him moving toward the first. “Is that a hot tub?”

“Just a little one,” Tony promised, tugging in vain.

“But why’s it in my guest room?” Steve demanded, that army-mule glint coming into his eyes as he stared at the thing

“Because it wouldn’t fit in your shower,” Tony answered, doing his best to get a shoulder into Steve’s ribs from behind, “Gah, why are you like this?”

“Why is there a hot tub in my guest room?”

“Because,” said Natasha, slipping around to grab Steve’s face in both hands, as Tony gave up pushing the immovable object and just began stripping out of his own clothes, “Because you’ve had a really bad day, and so have we, and your omega self-soothes through extravagant materialistic gestures.” Which was true and all, but did she have to just go and _say_ it? “And since _you_ apparently self-soothe by going out in public and getting shot at by strangers, I don’t really think you have a lot of room to complain, Rogers!”

“That’s not —”

“It is,” Tony cut him off, unclipping his watch as he slipped past into the room where the steaming tub waited, “It really is.”

Steve cut a wounded glare his way — sort of his way, since Natasha hadn’t let go of his face yet. “I only-”

“Steve,” Natasha put just enough alpha rumble into her growl to shut the protest down (and not so coincidentally, to get Tony’s omegabits a little interested.) Then she let go of Steve’s face and yanked his fly open, “just take your damn pants off.”

And oh my, but the sight of All That was just never gonna get old, was it? “I’m Tony Stark,” Tony announced, climbing into the tub and turning to make grabby hands in Steve’s direction, “and I fully endorse this message!”

And maybe it was the eager look on Tony’s face, or Natasha methodically pantsing him where he stood, or even just the surprise of finding a steaming tub where he’d expected his guest bed to be, but Steve abruptly began to giggle. Which was, Tony figured, emphatically better than the other kind of emotional outburst he’d been on the edge of just a few minutes earlier. Overall, he was gonna count that as a win.

“Wait, my boots,” Steve snickered as Natasha shoulder checked him off balance to strip his jeans down one leg, “Let me get my boots off!”

“You had your chance, Rogers,” she rowled back, yanking the laces just loose enough to pry one boot off his foot, “We’re doing this my way now.”

“Better not to fight, Steve,” Tony advised, setting the supplies neatly in reach of the tub’s edge, “Her way sometimes involves a hypospray.”

“You’re welcome,” Natasha shot back, lobbing Steve’s boot at Tony’s head and missing him only because he ducked. “Quit mentioning it.”

“Hey! No clothes in the tub!” Tony yelped, “I calculated the water displacement precisely.” Because, as they both knew, if any of the floors in the apartment got damaged here, Tony was gonna be the one paying to have them repaired.

“But she’s — whoa now!” Steve reeled a little as Natasha’s shoulder nudged his thigh back, the impact just a little higher than Tony would have called safe, if it’d been him being stripped by the Widow, “Can’t help noticing who’s the only one still dressed though, Nat,” he pointed out as he lifted his foot at her tugging and surrendered his last boot to the inevitable.

“That’s because,” she paused to peck a kiss to his naked hip as she stood, “you’ve had a really bad day, and so have we, and your woman self-soothes through standing guard over her vulnerable omegas.” Which was true, actually, and Tony found himself a little embarrassed that he hadn’t realized that about her until she’d said it.

“Do you trust me to do that, Steve?” she asked him, quelling the playful mood under a solemn, searching stare as she laid both hands to his chest, “Do you trust me to keep you safe?”

“You know I do,” Steve replied, selling his hallmark moment a little less well as he chuckled, and caught her in close for another hug that all of them knew very well would never have happened without her full, if grudging, consent. “I trust you,” he promised against the smooth red shine of her hair, “but you’re not allowed to shoot my neighbors.”

Her grin flashed white, as she said, “I’ll take it under consideration.” 

And that was all the warning Tony got before she twisted, swept Steve’s legs, and body-checked his stagger directly at the tub. “Hey!” he protested, catching Steve to his chest, and interrupting his flailing trajectory just shy of a deck-swamping disaster. “Displacement! I calculated this!” 

The Widow only paused long enough to blow them both a kiss from the doorway, leaving Tony to get Steve, who had now gone boneless with giggles, actually _into_ the hot tub. Because of course she fucking did. What even was Tony’s life, anyway? “Hey, Hysterios, you’re getting kinda heavy here,” he protested, hauling backward in vain, because like hell was he going to be able to deadlift 250lbs of Super Soldier over the tub rim. “You wanna maybe stand up so you can have this breakdown in comfort?”

“Not a breakdown,” Steve huffed, getting his feet under him at last, “It’s just…” he turned in Tony’s arms, and nuzzled sweetly, damply into the curve of his neck, “You caught me again.”

Oh. Oh fuck, did that brush of soft lips against Tony’s bonding gland do Certain Things to his soft and oft-denied gooey center. Certain very unfair things, that the words only made gooier. “Yeah,” he found himself murmuring against the salty crisp of Steve’s hair, “Every time, Steve. I’ll catch you every time.”

***

The Winter Soldier caught back up to the limousine just as it was pulling away from an apartment building’s curb, trailing the spoor of spoiled kimchee from behind the Asian place near the cop shop as it went. It had been a long run, and the Soldier’d had to be creative with the freeway, but the trail had led him here, to where the wounded alpha’s blood scent hung like a weary sigh in the still night air.

It was no challenge to get into the building, security system and door buzzers notwithstanding, but given the inevitability of elevator cameras, it did take the Soldier a little while to work out to which floor, and into which apartment his quarry had gone to ground. By the time he reached the fourth floor however, all confusion had evaporated. The alpha’s scent was there — blood and ire, and thin-worn cotton temper — but more importantly, the omega’s homescent bloomed sweetly into the corridor in a growing pool of safety and welcome, so rich and yearning it seemed to outline the door in golden light. 

He was in there. They both were in there.

Pressing close to the door, the Soldier let his lips part over his teeth and drew the air deep and high into his throat, rolling the notes across his tongue consideringly. Three people where there should have been four; an omega who rang of solder, hibiscus, and cinnamon candy; a woman whose faint odor lurked like a shadow of book dust, warm fur, and musk rose; the stress-sour blood scent of the alpha’s blood, but overwhelmingly, knitting the palette together, the cream, salt caramel, and sun warmed linen that the Soldier had sampled so often from the tracking scrap that he would have known it from ten thousand just alike.

He pressed his hand to the door, feeling it settle firmly into the hinges and latch. It was solid; hardwood and sturdy metal, framed in the same vintage quality that had been carefully, lovingly preserved over the decades since this elegant old place had been built. The urge to literally tear the thing to pieces just to get closer to the omega behind it was a potent, visceral thing. Still, he hesitated: the others… the Captain’s pack of Avengers… they could ruin everything if he went in without intel, and the Soldier knew on an atomic level that if he took this chance to claim his kill and missed it, the Captain’s pack would not afford him another.

Assuming he escaped their retaliation at all, of course. The press here claimed they had stopped an alien army by themselves, after all, and as the damage from the invasion had still been evident in the City when the Soldier had passed through, the tales of Gods and Monsters couldn’t _all_ have been propaganda. He hadn’t concerned himself with the other members of the Avengers pack before, because he hadn’t needed to; his quarry was lone, not packbonded. He might have led the colorful team to that victory, but the scrap of plaid had made it plain that there would be no pack riding to avenge the Captain once the Soldier fulfilled his mission directive… that, like every other thing the Soldier’s handlers had led him to believe about his target, was rapidly proving itself to be untrue.

He knew, on some level, that he was not meant to be concerned by that. He’d completed missions on bad, faulty, and sometimes outright false intel in the past. Counterintelligence, internal incompetence, even tests designed to evaluate the Soldier’s complicity and skill had all happened before, and every time that he could recall, the Soldier had completed his mission without hesitation, without confusion, and without delay. There was something about this mission, however — something in the imprecise directives, something in the unsupported agency he’d been given for this hunt, something slipping between the fingers of the control words his handler did not quite grasp — that made everything different. That made the fact that the data would not tally lead to questions in the Soldier’s mind. That made those questions demand answers.

He needed a better vantage point. Better cover. A private place to set up surveillance, but… but tearing himself away from that door was proving far more difficult than anticipated. He had pressed his cheek to the wood, he realized, his nose just at the sliver of space between the hinges, where inside breathed minutely into outside. He was also, for some reason he could not fathom, trembling.

The woman’s voice broke his reverie; low and resonant, and so near to the door where the Soldier leaned that the shock of it froze the breath in his lungs and the thoughts in his skull. “Healing up well, from what I could see. He’s been worse.” There was a pause then, and a reply too distant, too muffled for the Soldier to make out, but the woman’s reply was somewhere between amusement and annoyance. “Oddly enough, that’s exactly what we said. Of course he did. It’s like you both know him or something.” 

The door beneath his shoulder shuddered suddenly, deadbolt shooting home with a solid *thunk* that the Soldier could feel all the way to his feet. Only training kept him from lurching away at the feel of it. 

“So I did some digging on this Wilson guy.” The woman’s voice faded with her retreating steps, but the words were still clear enough. “Staff Sergeant Wilson, Samuel Thomas, 58th Pararescue, retired. Codename Falcon. Two tours in Afghanistan. Yeah. Remember the Bakhmala raid, with Khandil? That was them. No, he really seems legit. Counselor at the VA, who just happened to be on hand when Cap needed a medic. Not even Jarvis turned up anything on him.”

On the cusp of pulling away from the door, the Soldier hesitated, recalling the beta who had shoved the Captain out of danger’s way that afternoon — no miracle of reflexes, given how close the gunman was, but lucky enough, he supposed. The pack did not know him, for all the Captain had treated him like a friend. Wilson, Samuel Thomas. The man might be useful later on.

“I’ll have more by tomorrow’s debrief with Fury, I’m sure,” the woman continued, her voice a smooth doppler swell and fade of pacing the apartment on near-silent feet. “We’ve got tonight to get Steve settled and … what?” The edge that came into her voice could have cut glass. “Pierce? As in Secretary Pierce? Are you serious right now?” Her tone went hard and low, coming close to the door again, as if to conceal the conversation’s turn from the omegas in the apartment with her. “Phil, why the hell is Fury letting Pierce take the incident report on this mess?”

Leaning close again, the Soldier listened hard to the tinny, distant murmur of reply from the other side of the phone call, but he could glean no actionable intel from it. And then the woman’s response — a heartfelt burst of Volga-dockside profanity that felt as familiar to him as his own rifle — sent a sharper thrill of danger down his spine. Where had he heard that voice, swearing that curse, in that tone before? Who was it in that room right now? Who was it, really?

It was a momentary distraction, a short, sharp spiral of panic quickly crushed beneath a stab of familiar determination. All over in a handful of rattling seconds. Those seconds were, however, enough to leave the Soldier flat footed and utterly without cover when the door to the next apartment down flung open, and a young man in pajamas, an oversized sweater, and duck slippers came stomping out of it. “Seriously, you guys? I have a _job_ to do here, and you guys aren’t even as FUCK-”

The Soldier lunged, caught the omega’s shrill panic in his steel hand and gripped, letting the momentum of his charge carry them both back through the open door he’d come from. He kicked the door shut and spun, setting his hostage’s back to the wood and pressing the muzzle of his Sig up tight beneath his chin, informing the young man in the silent fashion of assassins, that his life hung by a single thread, which was not a very robust thread at all, and could easily be snapped by the smallest noise on his part. There was understanding in the man’s grey eyes as the Captain’s door opened into the hallway — a distant click of lock disengaging, a hissing carpet sweep, a looming weight of listening silence. Flop sweat pricked his thick, curling dark hair, and spiked fear-sharp through his scent, but those eyes also simmered affronted exasperation and a rising, spicy ire that the Soldier found at once dangerous, and strangely comforting. The man — boy almost, for he seemed barely out of his teens — was definitely frightened, but he was not cowed. So long as he was silent, however, the Soldier could work with letting him live.

The listening silence gave way to another slow sweep of door across carpet. Then, three heartbeats later, the woman’s voice came through the wood, low and level with danger; savage thorns lurking under sweet, spreading rose. “Lewis? Everything all right?”

The boy’s gaze flicked to the right, and he swallowed, then his glance slid back to the Soldier, and he raised one eyebrow, eloquent and expectant. _Well?_ The Soldier shifted his hand down to the boy’s shoulder, gripping meat and bone beneath his wooly sweater, trusting the pressure of gun beneath his chin to carry the point of discretion.

“Fine, ma’am,” the boy — Lewis — said after taking a moment to work his jaw a bit. “It’s just…” he winced under the Soldier’s warning grip, and glared a warning of his own. “You guys do know I’m going to have to report the jammers when I file tonight’s debrief, right?”

_Jammers?_ The Soldier schooled the confusion away from his face, and stole a glance around the apartment, only now seeing the anonymous furnishings in forgettable colors, and the unsubtle and fairly elaborate monitoring station set up against the wall the boy’s apartment shared with the Captain’s. From this angle, the Soldier could track several audio channels of white noise, on the open laptop’s screen, as well as a monochrome overhead view of an utterly empty living room — clearly looped without concern plausibility of deception.

The Soldier’s sense of imminent danger — already riding quite high — ramped up abruptly as the woman in the hallway gave a darkly amused snort. “Stark’s involved, Dar,” she said, and the honeyed ease in her voice felt exactly like a trap, “surveillance ops will expect nothing less.”

Lewis swallowed, the ridge of his throat jostling the Soldier’s gun just _so_ much, but sass spread thick as jam on his reply. “Yeah well, it’s not your yearly review coming up at the end of the month either, Ms. Romanoff, and with Dr. Foster on Asgard, I really need this job.” The boy’s complaint ended on a hiss, and an aborted wriggle against the Soldier’s sudden clench on his shoulder as the name — Romanoff — The name sank like a stone into the Soldier’s belly.

“What was that?” the woman, who could not possibly be the Red Room’s deadliest prodigy, asked, and the Soldier forced himself still, inert, so silent not even his heartbeat might betray him. It wasn’t an uncommon name. Especially now that Stalin’s boot had lifted, and people could afford nostalgia for a fancier boot from times no one now remembered. Romanoff. It could be anyone.

“Nothing ma’am,” Lewis answered, canny eyed and too clever by half as he stared at the Soldier as if he knew something. “Just bit my tongue a little.”

Skeptical silence answered, jagged with looming disaster, and the Winter Soldier began to realize that his only means of regaining control of the situation was probably going to involve violence, property damage, and a stunning amount of luck. And, as if invoked by name, Luck erupted from the next door down the hall.

“Natasha!” a man’s voice yelped suddenly, making both the Soldier and his hostage jolt in mutual alarm, “Where are the damn towels?”

And just like that, the rising storm bled away into exasperated fondness.

“They’re in the bathroom,” the Widow’s voice muffled as she turned her back to Lewis’s door. “Where towels belong. Where are _your_ damn pants?”

“I looked in the bathroom,” the man replied, all outrage and cinnamon candy, “Those aren’t _towels_ , those are barely washcloths! It would take, like, twenty to dry a toddler!”

“Normal, non-billionaire towels are like that, Stark,” her voice faded down the hall, leaving the Soldier pressed close to his hostage, and chilled to the core. “You have to unfold them first…”

The door shut.

The Soldier allowed himself a long, and shaking breath as the pieces of the Mission reshuffled themselves into yet another configuration. 

If they Avengers were keeping the omega captive, the Widow would be how they’d manage it. But the Widow’s involvement cast a strong weight against Lukin’s authority to order this kill. Unless, while he’d been inactive, there had been a schizm within the Red Room; a theft of resources and personnel to crossed purposes, petty and personal. This could be a contest between rivals, a game to see who could kill the American hero first and flashiest. Or the entire mission could be a nothing more than a test of his loyalty to Department X, the Red Room, and the Motherland. That had happened before, he thought; he had been tested, and he had not failed. 

He would not fail now, either. The Captain was his to kill, and no sneaking spider, no common thug, and no corrupt police bureaucracies would he allow to steal it. He would crack the riddle of this shell game man, and his patchwork pack; he would unpick the contradictions in his orders, augur the presence of the Widow in the Captain’s den, and he would pass this test.

Winter could not be stopped. Patient and inevitable, it conquered all.

A tentative cough intruded on the Soldier’s reverie, and he opened his eyes as his hostage swallowed hard, and let his head fall back against the door. “So I’m sure there must be a protocol for being kidnapped by cyborgs while on duty,” Lewis whispered jaw red where the gun had pressed it closed, “but it’s like, _way_ above my pay grade, so… d’you think we could, maybe, talk about this?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the lag, beloved blisterworts, I needed to shake some things out of the storyline, and also, to make sure the sun was gonna keep rising in the coming year.
> 
> Comments are love, and y'all know it! Thanks for reading, and even more for keeping me going as winter takes hold (patient and inevitable, it conquers all...)


	9. Switch

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Switch: A change, a weapon, a deception, a mechanical interface.

It would be an understatement of criminal proportions to claim that before he cashed SHIELD’s recruitment bonus check, Darce Lewis’s field trainer had told him there would be days like this.

Also, depending on how literal you were prepared to be, it would be an outright lie. Because let’s face it, “you will feel completely out of your depth, and have to rely on your wits and good luck to manage the situation” was really not the same level of fuckery as “your surveillance-op-that-we’re-politely-agreeing-to-call-a-protection-detail will suddenly turn into a hostage situation involving a literal cyborg assassin, and oh also, the hostage is you.” But the theme fit, if you squinted.

There _was_ a man with a whole-ass metal arm currently in the stakeout apartment, after all, and he _was_ using that arm to hold Darce almost off his feet, with the barrel of a very large demand for compliance shoved up hard under his chin. Darce’s own gun was across the room next to the laptop and monitoring station — because he was an _actual_ idiot, apparently. Every shred of his combat training was telling Probationary Field Agent Darce Lewis in no uncertain terms that this whole situation was _way_ above his pay grade. And quite possibly on fire and about to explode too.

But there was something else, something small and furtive and weirdly _certain_ in the back of his brain that was telling him that it was actually going quite well. That somehow, being crushed so hard against the door that he could hardly breathe in the terror-acrid, burning plastic and bay rum scent of his murderous omega assassin was a lucky break, and he should ride it as far as he could get it to go. That something was probably out to kill him, of course, but having nothing else to go on, and no other way to figure out why the fuck he’d failed to scream for help when the Widow had been right on the other side of the door, that something seemed to be the only part of Darce’s brain with the slightest idea what to do next.

“Surveillance op,” tall, dark and cybernetic growled, tilting his chin at the monitoring station set up against the apartment’s shared wall. “HYDRA?”

“What?” Darce blurted, “No! Ew!” Then the gun pressed his teeth closed, and he had to struggle to get the words out. “I’m SHIELD, asshole. Nazi doom cults don’t do it for me.” 

He felt the cyborg flinch as his words made it through whatever haze of drugs, patriotism or suspicion was going on in his hard drive. Then abruptly, Darce’s duck slippers were on the carpet again, and sweet, sweet air filled his throat with the perfume of confused anxiety and clover. The metal grip shifted, snagged the lanyard ID Darce still had clipped to his sweat shirt, and flipped it over to show the photo. _It won’t leave fingerprints_ , Darce realized giddily as his knees took on the unexpected job of holding him up against his new best friend, the door. The gun wasn’t jammed under his chin anymore, which was a good thing, but it hadn’t gone far, and Darce was certain there was still a finger on it’s trigger. 

“Who else?” Cyborg demanded, face just as murderous as before, scent still simmering with that wounded, feral acidity, but threading through now with something that smelled distantly like fascination. “In the apartment?”

“Um,” Darce glanced around tellingly, fully aware that his own aura was souring into annoyance despite his fear, “this is an open plan loft, pal. The only place anyone could be is the bathroom, in which case don’t you think you’da clocked the stink by now?”

“No!” Cyborg pulled him from the door with a shake of pure frustration, and whirled Darce to face the shared wall with the Captain’s place. “In the _apartment_ ,” he said it like he was explaining to an idiot, “You’ve been here. Listening all day.”

“All month, more like,” Darce grumbled as he was frogmarched toward the desk.

“How long has the _omega_ been in that apartment?” Cyborg demanded, voice still tense and low, but now a blooming sweetness was rising through the cloud of awful that had hung around him. “Has he been there all day? Who’s keeping him there? How many guards?”

And just like that, the penny dropped. _Guards. Omega. Oh shit, agent Coulson said nobody knew about that!_

Darce swallowed hard, remembering his first day briefing with the handler, and the subject information that had decidedly _not_ been included in the briefing packet. Darce hadn’t needed to be told why nothing about Captain America’s very changeable gender status could show up in any of his records or reports. No omega in the world would be in any way confused on that point. 

Except, apparently, for this one with the metal arm.

“Um, omega?” he stalled, “You… don’t mean Mr. Stark, do you?”

Cyborg growled — like, literally growled — and gave Darce a shake that rattled his teeth before marching them both directly to the monitoring station. “Show me,” he demanded, dropping Darce like a pillow into the desk chair, then plucking his gun from beside the keyboard like a bug. “Both of them. The whole pack. Show me everything you have.”

Darce swallowed down twenty unwise responses to that order in the time it took him to get a single breath in and back out again. There were a lot of ways this thing could go, but the end destination was going to involve one of two things; Darce alive, or Darce dead. Jane would fucking kill him if she had to learn from Thor that Darce had let SHIELD get him killed. And given her current field of study on Asgard with the twenty-centuries-old Valkyrie Witch-Queen, that wasn’t as much of a contradiction as it seemed. 

And besides, now that Darcy had been inside old Clanky and Lanky’s personal bubble long enough to get past the tortured-asphalt-and-horror smell on him, he couldn’t help noticing the sweetening of his base scent from fear into something like gin, clover, bay rum and longing. And you could always work with longing, right?

“Sure, pal,” Darce replied, closing the useless camera feeds that Stark had looped, and calling up the files from earlier that week. “Welcome to the Steve Rogers Peep and Creep Special. Pull up a chair, and get ready for a _lot_ of push-ups…”

~*~

“This sofa is ridiculous,” Tony grumbled, and while it wasn’t often that Natasha agreed with him — he tended to be insufferable when she did — she privately thought he had a point. The sofa’s padding was thin, the upholstery rough, the legs just a bit too short for ease on the knees, the cushions just too shallow for ease on the back. It seemed to have been designed to keep people off rather than on it.

Steve however, rose to its defense with an unconvincing sigh. “It’s fine, Tony,” he said, and shifted his bare arm up along the back so as to give the complaining omega more shoulder room. 

“It’s absurd!” Tony went on, not noticing as Natasha elbowed Steve into repeating the motion on her side too, “It’s a narrow, short rock covered in burlap, and I want to set it on fire.”

“No fire.” Natasha tried to ignore the alarming pop the sofa’s frame made when she leaned forward to glare around Steve’s chest. “Our omega’s had enough emergency services excitement for the day. I agree about the couch though. It is kind of crappy. Where did you get this thing, Steve?”

Steve shrugged and stared at the fireplace, his jaw set in that mulishly stubborn look he sometimes put on when he knew she was poking fun and wanted her to feel she was doing well. “Came with the apartment, like everything else. I didn’t see any point in replacing it on my own dime.”

The entire sofa jolted with Tony’s abortive attempt to whip around on Steve in outrage. “Didn’t see any-” he sputtered, “You’re over six feet of muscle, and this thing would be too short for my fifteen year old intern to steal a nap on! And he can nap literally anywhere!”

“Is that the same intern you tweeted sleeping under the particle accelerator last month?” Natasha mused, more to wind Steve up than because she was in any way unsure. It had been a cute picture, after all.

Rising gamely to the teasing, Steve ruffled Tony’s hair and grumbled, “It’s a sofa, not a bed. It’s for _sitting on_. If I want to lie down, I go into the bedroom. Where the bed is.”

“Technically,” Natasha informed him, deflecting his half-hearted attempt to muss her hair while Tony was wrestling with his other arm, “we’re sitting now. At least until it breaks under Stark’s squirming and dumps us all on the floor.”

It had been a warning, and so of course Tony took it for a dare instead. “Then can I replace it with an actual couch?” he asked, craning back over the sofa’s arm to avoid Steve’s playful reach, “Like, one that didn’t come from Ikea’s dollhouse collection maybe?”

“Tony,” Steve growled, grabbing a fistful of Tony’s pajama pants just in time to save him from gravity’s cruel embrace, “no.”

“Please?” Tony yelped as he was yanked back into his narrow slice of cushion and pinned firmly against Steve’s naked chest. “Pretty please? I swear this thing’s gonna leave bruises.”

Natasha couldn’t help a chuckle at that, and she reached across to pat Tony’s hickey-spotted shoulder. “I heard you yowling when he was giving you those bruises, Stark,” she smirked, “The sofa’s not to blame.”

“Don’t be jealous Nat,” Tony leered back, stroking the trophy-marked column of his own throat, “You could’ve had love bites too, if you hadn’t been so busy patrolling when our Omega was feeling possessive.”

“Well if I’d known it was bruises you were after…” Natasha smiled back, watching him remember their last sparring session with a visible flinch that set the sofa groaning again.

And that, apparently, was the limit of Steve’s patience. 

“Oh, for the love…” he growled, then grabbed Tony around the waist and kicked them both into a violent, sidelong of barrel roll that gave the sofa every excuse it needed to drop them all right onto the hardwood floor. Natasha tensed, ready to jump and roll to safety, but Steve’s head and shoulders came down on her thighs as he kicked his knees out over the sofa’s far arm. Miraculously, despite making noises like an angry mule kicking an accordion, the whole thing held together. 

“Here,” Steve demanded of Tony, who was clamped to his chest like a wide-eyed, panic-frozen kitten, “You comfy now?” 

Her own heart was racing, but Natasha managed to confine her retaliation to using Steve’s ear shift his head higher onto her thighs. If they were going down now, apparently, they were all going together. It was a concept she was getting more comfortable with as their packbond went on.

Tony, it seemed, came to a similar conclusion, as his wriggling aimed not at escape, but more at settling into the landscape that was Steve. “Well to be fair,” he allowed with a showy pout, “you actually are softer to lie on. But I’ve actually seen you punch through a tank, so that’s really not an endorsement for the couch. Which you should let me replace” Tony added as he gave another extravagant wriggle to set his forehead firmly under Steve’s chin.

“Tony.”

Oh, but it was adorable how Steve, as softly, sweetly omega as he could be, was actually trying to dominance growl even as he was soothing the back of Tony’s neck.

“Steve!” Tony parroted the tone right back at him, his own hand smoothing over the hot pink welts on Steve’s shoulder which had, only a few hours before, been bleeding wounds, “I’ve seen better couches in college dorms! How do you expect your pack to cuddle you on this thing?”

“I don’t,” Steve answered, capturing Tony’s hand. The weight of that declaration stopped Natasha’s hand cold, wet golden hair threaded through her fingers, 

Even Tony shocked still and silent, eyes wide and suddenly wary until Steve gave a clanging eyeroll and knocked the leaden moment askew. “This apartment isn’t for _denning_ , you two! it’s owned, monitored, and-” he gave the arm of the sofa a kick that made it jolt and groan under them, “ _decorated_ by SHIELD, for one thing, and for another,” he paused for a nip at Tony’s captured fingers, and then butted pointedly into Natasha’s palm again, “why should my pack want to be cuddling here when home’s just a few hours away?”

Keeping the warmth that bloomed in her chest to herself, Natasha resumed petting Steve’s hair as Tony braced himself up on Steve’s chest and mock glared, “Okay, I know the nation’s capitol is no Brooklyn, but-”

“I meant the Tower, Tony,” Steve sighed, not-so-gently pressing Tony back down, “The Den you’ve been keeping for us since the Chitauri attack?”

“That’s… you…” Natasha didn’t bother to hide her smirk at Tony’s gobsmacked look. 

“You built us a home, Tony, and _that_ home’s where I want to go to be with my Pack. So it doesn’t much matter what kind of furniture I have here, does it?” He gave the sofa end another kick. Natasha resigned herself to the probability that he was going to literally double dog dare the poor thing into kindling right underneath them.

Tony muffled his reply, and the cinnamon copper blush of his reaction in Steve’s neck, and Natasha gave Steve’s golden hair a tug to draw his sky-bright eyes to hers. “Extravagant materialistic gestures…” she singsonged. At which, said billionaire muttered again and put up a halfhearted middle finger at her. 

Steve caught it and folded it gently back down with the others with an indulgent smile for Tony’s show of struggle. “Well,” he said, in that too-casual voice he used when he wanted people to think he’d only just come up with an idea, “if we all registered the packbond legally, then the Tower _would_ officially be our home, wouldn’t it?”

This time, Natasha managed not to freeze under the onslaught of emotion those words, on his lips, invoked in her. It was everything Fury had warned her the WSC feared. It was a foolish, paperwork fancy that would mean nothing whatsoever against the actual bond Steve had given them last year, but to the rest of the world… It was everything they would celebrate, deride, cherish, and abuse. It would be waved like a flag, like a target, like a dream come true, and like proof of insoluble bias by anyone with a point to prove. It was everything they would all — and how strange to realize she knew this for fact — all of them would fight to the death to defend, if they dared to declare it theirs. It was a _terrible_ idea, and the strength of Natasha’s immediate longing for it shocked her.

Tony didn’t even try to conceal his alarm. “Are…” He struggled out of Steve’s grip and backed into the coffee table. Then he lurched back to his knees and grabbed Steve’s face to check his pupils. “Did you get hit in the head? Were you concussed? We can’t do that!”

“Why can’t we?” Steve batted Tony’s hand away and sat up chin first to the challenge.

“Gosh,” Natasha mused, crossing one knee over the other and bouncing her heel, “maybe because the world thinks this Pack’s bonding omega is actually an alpha all the time, and not just when you want to be? And also, it seems kind of important to let the world go right on thinking that?”

The devious grin Steve flashed her way was unexpected. “Packs don’t have to reveal their members’ status when registering anymore,” he told them smugly, “I looked it up.”

“Of course you looked it up!” 

Steve rolled on, undeterred by Tony’s outburst. “Every one of the Avengers could be medically null and nobody could even ask about it when we file the paperwork. None of that stuff will go into the public record.”

“Honey, you know I love you, but since when has the rumor mill ever stopped to consult public records?” Tony pleaded, protesting exactly enough to prove that he wanted what Steve was proposing just as deeply as Natasha did, and was also just as terrified.

“Tony’s right,” she told Steve, standing carefully and neatening her clothes with brisk hands, “The public never needed a document to decide something was true.” She was buying time, but Steve wasn’t selling a second. 

“Then nothing will have changed,” he answered, leveling her with an open challenge of a stare as he too got to his feet, “You both watched the interview this morning, and you know it’s always like that — Tony, how many times a week do you get asked which of the Avengers is going to catch you quick and fill up your kit with a litter? And Nat,they pester you all the damn time about when you’ll be nesting down to brood, even though you’ve openly said that you’re nought!” The vulgarities he usually worked so hard to avoid tolled sharply off Steve’s tongue, and Tony’s face told Natasha she wasn’t the only one feeling stung by them. “So if they’re going to tell each other lies about us anyhow, why are we all hiding?” Steve slipped an earnest, almost pleading look from Natasha to Tony and back again. “Why aren’t _we_ getting the rights and privileges that Packs are entitled to by law?”

“Because we’re Avengers, Steve,” Natasha made herself answer, skirting close enough to the truth she’d fought Nick Fury over, that the canny omegas might pick up the scent of it without her having to say so outright, “We fight world-scale threats, and we win, and that all by itself scares people. If they start to think that our loyalty is to each other, and not to the greater good, then-”

“Then let em,” Steve growled, a basso rumble coming into his voice, and a spike of salt seasoning the sweetness of his scent. “We prove ourselves every single mission, and we face the same suspicion every time we come home, no matter how well we did!” He flailed angry defiance at the world outside the apartment walls, then winced as his healing shoulder complained. “Having us… having _this_ officially, so it can’t be hidden away, or buried in red tape and bullshit isn’t going to change that nonsense one way or another. But if it does, maybe it will change some things for the better!”

Staring, Natasha let the silence settle. 

Tony gently broke it before she’d figured out how to correct Steve’s naivete without scathing them into a fight. “Steve,” he asked, brow creased with worry, “is this about the reporters? I mean, the press can be shitty, but we can hire PR and Legal teams to-”

“It’s _not_ about the damn reporters!” Steve shouted, and in the following silence, brought both hands up to cover his face. It could have been regret for his outburst, but Natasha read a different current threading the damp breaths that hissed between his palms.

“The police,” she said, understanding at once.

“Fucking police,” Tony agreed darkly.

“S’ not the first time I’ve been arrested, guys,” Steve tried, unconvincing from behind his hands.

Natasha pushed them away from his face, and gave him a stern smile. “Getting arrested on a picket line or a protest rally is not the same as a four hour interrogation, Steve,” she said, “It’s not the rights and privileges of a registered Pack; it’s the rights and _protections_ , isn’t it?”

Steve confirmed it with a sharp nod, and did not shy from her stare.

“Steve,” Tony said, drumming nervous fingers on the bare mantle, “Those Cops today, they didn’t have the right to do that to you. They were out of line from the moment they drew guns on you, and -”

“I know,” Steve replied, but Tony wasn’t ready to be reassured just yet.

“- and even if the Avengers HAD a formal pack registration on file, those assholes would probably have ‘forgotten’,” Actual airquotes. Natasha rolled her eyes. “to run the search until they’d had a go at you anyhow, which is why I promise you, Walters is going to make sure no PD in this country ever takes you for a soft celebrity target again,” Tony wagged a stern finger, “so help me-” Steve caught that finger of admonition, then used it to draw Tony back into hugging range. Natasha tried not to find it cute how Tony almost even struggled. 

“Tony,” Steve dropped a kiss in Tony’s wrist, then tucked the other omega firmly against his side. “I know. But it’s not about...” he licked his lips, “Well, not _just_ about the arrest rights. It’s …” his eyes caught Natasha’s then, still determined, but vulnerable now. “It’s medical too. I want — I don’t want something to happen to any of Ours, and have anybody tell us we can’t be there for them.” He huffed half a laugh, and summoned up a brittle smile to add, “I’d hate to go to jail for punching my way into an ICU to sit watch if one of my pack’s been hurt.”

It’s okay,” Tony quipped smugly, “You can just say Barton’s name.” Pinned as he was, Stark had no hope of dodging the revenge pinch Natasha served him for that slight, but wisely did not protest its justice. “Anyway,” he went on, rubbing his bicep sulkily, “Hospital administrators are very flexible about things like that when donations are on the table, you know.”

Natasha smiled, and cracked her thumb at him. “Civilian hospitals, maybe,” she allowed, snagging Steve’s other hand to tow them both down the hall toward the bedroom. “Come on. I’ve decided you want to lie down.”

“And what about cycle rights?” Steve went without complaint, still declaiming his argument, “If one of us gets heat-stranded away from the rest, or drops into a public rut, what happens then? What if someone at a care ward, hospital, or heat enclave decides we’re not competent to consent? Or to declare our preferred partners without a pack registry we can claim shelter with?”

Natasha knocked the bedroom door out of her way with more force than it needed, but she managed not to snarl at the idea. The knowing glance Steve shot her as he led an equally appalled Tony into the room let her know that the scarlet rage had spiked right through her scent. 

“Okay now,” Tony began, wriggling out of Steve’s grip, “that’s just not-”

But Steve clearly wasn’t done. “That used to happen all the time back when I was a kid,” he said, busying himself with stripping the coverlet off the bed and turning the sheets down, “Everyone knew it, even if they didn’t say. I know it still goes on now, even though it shouldn’t. SHIELD even made me sign a waver about ‘emergency cycle access and relief’ before they’d clear me for field work.” There was real anguish in his voice now, lurking like a hot slick of blood beneath the righteous outrage that had him punch-fluffing the pillows. “If I get Hazed during a solo operation, the ranking officer present, or on comms, has the right to… to appoint-” 

Natasha caught the abused pillow from his hands, then tucked his knuckles beneath her chin, rubbing her stunted scenting glands along his fists to soothe him. Steve swallowed hard, and held her gaze with his as Tony climbed the bed to drape himself over Steve’s back like a tawny, nuzzling cape. 

“I don’t want to,” Steve breathed after a long moment, and she could feel the finest tremble in the pres of fingers around hers. “I’d kill them. If it wasn’t one of you and they tried to… to make me.” A deep breath, definitely shaking now, sinking slowly to the mattress as though his knees wouldn’t hold the awful idea up any longer, “I’d just… tear them apart, and I don’t. I can’t…”

“Shh,” she soothed, stepping close and letting him rest his forehead on her ribs, shielding him from the front while Tony covered his back with warmth and kisses. “I know. I know.”

And she couldn’t tell him, could she, that this was exactly why she never let them send him on solo ops? That she’d disobeyed orders before to be with him when she shouldn’t have been, and that she’d hacked SHIELD systems and rewritten op plans to be sure she could be there for him, and he for her. Knowing that would only fuel this. And fueling this would only add to the weight of those trying to keep them apart. But oh, there was a young, and an innocent ghost in Natasha that keened to take up the invitation Steve was sending. To have a solid claim, not only to her battle alpha, but her own omega and and beta mates. To be able to raise the children of the pack, even though she would never, herself, be involved in siring or bearing any. To call those children her own, and to know that she’d be allowed to fight for them. It was all the simple wealth that the Red Room had taken from her, back when she’d been too young to understand the loss, and yes — there was a part of her which wanted it back, and fiercely so.

But Natasha also had a lifetime’s practice at not allowing herself to want what she couldn’t have, and like most things the Red Room had given her, it was a bitter skill, but good to have at need. “But this isn’t a decision we can make between the three of us, is it?” she murmured into the crown of Steve’s head, “Clint, Phil, Thor and Bruce all deserve their say, and Stark, I know you’ll want to at least consult Potts before you make your mind up for good.”

Tony shot her a glare that was more fond than resentful, but nodded as he kicked askew Steve’s carefully turned down bed, and drew the soldier down into it with him. “Yeah, I’m pretty sure there’s a clause in Potts’ contract that if I register a legal bond without giving her notice in writing 24 hours before, she can take my company and all my money away. And I’d hate being poor.”

That, at last, made Steve laugh. “You’d hate being poor,” he agreed, hip-nudging them both over toward the bed’s center to leave a conspicuously Natasha-sized space, the jut of his chin letting her know that if she was going to continue to stand watch, she’d better do it from the bed. “But this is a conversation I want to _make_ time for. Face to face, as soon as we can get everyone back together again.”

Ducking to unzip her boots, Natasha spared a querying glance, but it was Stark who put it to words first. “Ok, I’m all for the spirit of momentum honey, but is there actually a rush here?” he asked, cuddling up under Steve’s arm, “I mean you’re not due for a heat for months, if you choose to have one at all, and you’ve proven you can dodge a rut pretty well, even in combat conditions.”

“I just don’t want to let it slide,” Steve answered, his gaze elusive.

Natasha finished stripping off her jeans, and then braced her arms over her chest and stared until the truth he’d been dodging struggled free.

“I think. I mean I thought I. Today, down in the street, after the other sniper…” he scraped a hand through his hair, and then reached out across the empty bed, palm up and beseeching until Natasha allowed his gravity to draw her into the bed, and into his arms.

“Today, outside the bar,” Steve admitted after taking a deep, long breath against the crown of her head, “Someone in the street smelled like Haze.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello, my Adders, my Apples, my Attercops!  
> 
> 
> It's been literally 12 ugly months since I could update this story, and there've definitely been some changes around here. First, direct your attention, please, to the question mark on the chapter count. That means we're driving without a map now, because the old map caught fire and turned to goo. Ugly scene. We're making this up as we go along, and don't mind the Dragons.  
> 
> 
> Second, there's going to be some necessary alterations, added scenes, and rewrites to already published chapters in order to bring this whole thing to an actual conclusion more satisfying than driving it off a cliff and walking home, and that's where you come in.  
> 
> 
> Please comment on this chapter to let me know if you'd rather I backfill the new data into earlier chapters here, where people who aren't subscribed won't see it, or if you think it'd be better to hold things as they are here, and then post the newly altered text as its own story, in its own place?  
> 
> 
> You, my lovely puff adders, are the ones I'm writing this for, and so it's your preferences I choose to favor. Please tell me how you'd like to see this story proceed.  
> 
> 
> And also, any praise, adulation, social commentary, death threats, or proposals of marriage. Those are awesome too!  
> 

**Author's Note:**

> So... Didja miss me?


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